UMÁTICA. Journal on Image Creation and Analysis
Umática is a publication focused on the study and critical analysis of the image, artistic creation, and audiovisual production, proposing a transversal approach from an interdisciplinary perspective. Umática is a refereed scientific journal whose mission is to publish, disseminate and promote texts and essays on theory, art, aesthetics, and contemporary visual culture aimed at researchers in the field of image, sound, arts, and visual culture, The editorial profile focuses on the processes of creation, analysis, and distribution of contemporary creation through media and other hybrid languages made possible by technology. In this sense, at the discretion of the editorial team and review process, it proposes three types of submissions for publication: Research articles, Visual Essay, and Artistic Creation Projects Funded by: Department of Art and Architecture, University of Málaga Published by : UMA Editorial (Universidad de Málaga) Diamond Open Access Journal Umática is currently indexed at: <a title="DOAJ" href="https://doaj.org/toc/2659-8574?source=%7B%22query%22%3A%7B%22filtered%22%3A%7B%22filter%22%3A%7B%22bool%22%3A%7B%22must%22%3A%5B%7B%22terms%22%3A%7B%22index.issn.exact%22%3A%5B%222659-5354%22%2C%222659-8574%22%5D%7D%7D%5D%7D%7D%2C%22query%22%3A%7B%22match_all%22%3A%7B%7D%7D%7D%7D%2C%22size%22%3A100%2C%22sort%22%3A%5B%7B%22created_date%22%3A%7B%22order%22%3A%22desc%22%7D%7D%5D%2C%22_source%22%3A%7B%7D%7D"> Umática in social networks:
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Migration and Contemporary Art in Turbulent Times. Call for Papers nº 9
Copyright (c) 2025 https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-nc-sa/4.0
The Italian composer Luciano Berio (1925-2003) entitled one of his lectures «Seeing Music» (1993-1994). As an example of this synaesthetic vision, we take as a reference an interdisciplinary work, Moving Picture (946-3) Kyoto Version (2019-24), an immersive installation in film and music which, based on the painting by Gerhard Richter (Dresden, *1932) entitled Abstraktes Bild (CR 946-3) (2016), cinematically recreated by Corinna Belz (Marburg, *1955) and complemented by a composition by Rebecca Saunders (London, *1967), was realised at the Kiyomizu-dera temple in Kyoto in 2019. Richter has always been attracted to classical music: series Bach (CR 785) (1992), Cage (CR 897-1) (2006). Saunders, for his part, has expressed an interest in the paintings of Mark Rothko. The colour red –Gerhard Richter, Red (CR 821) (1994), Abstraktes Bild (CR 849-3) (1997); Rebecca Saunders, Cinnabar (1999), Vermilion (2003), Crimson (2004/05)– stands as a common symbolic colour on which to build the visual and sonic fabric. In both Richter’s silent listening and Saunders’ sound listening, silence is an essential referent: «Silence is the blank canvas on which the weight of sound leaves its mark» (Rebecca Saunders).
Copyright (c) 2025 Antoni Gonzalo Carbó https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-nc-sa/4.0
Open Functionality: Sculptural Practices in Contemporary Urban Space
In the contemporary context, the presence of art in public space has evolved from symbolic or monumental models toward practices that enable new forms of use, encounter, and citizen appropriation. This article analyzes the concept of “open functionality” as a critical category to rethink how certain contemporary sculptures in urban environments activate non-prescribed possibilities of use. Through a critical bibliographic review and a comparative analysis of five recent case studies —works by Llobet & Pons, Jeppe Hein, Basurama, and Tercerunquinto— a progressive reading is proposed of how the functional dimension of the artistic object can open up to participatory, sensitive, and collective experiences. The article does not aim to establish a normative model but rather to offer tools to think about public art as an affective infrastructure, as a stage for new ways of inhabiting the city through everyday and sensitive practices.
Copyright (c) 2025 Carlos Muñecas https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-nc-sa/4.0
Hybridization between art and fashion: from aesthetic inspiration to digital transformation
The text analyzes the symbiotic relationship between art and fashion, exploring how contemporary artists insert themselves into the fashion system and use it as a means of artistic expression. It looks at how fashion is inspired by contemporary art movements and artists, reinterpreting their aesthetics, and how artists use fashion to communicate ideas and challenge the boundaries between functionality and aesthetics. The study examines the influence and fusion of art in the creation of fashion collections, the transformation of commercial spaces into art galleries and the emergence of immersive experiences in fashion shows. The use of new technologies, sustainability, ethics in production and the representation of body diversity are highlighted as key themes in the fusion of art and fashion. Curatorial research is presented thanks to the analysis of concrete cases of artists and designers who work with the fusion between art and fashion, marking a distance from textile art. In addition, the text is sustained thanks to a historicist methodology that seeks to understand the complex relationships between art, fashion and contemporary society.
Cultural fusion; Art and fashion; Inmersive exhibition; Fashion system; Textile art
Copyright (c) 2025 Carlos Valverde Martínez, Rita Cisnal Herrero https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-nc-sa/4.0
Executable verses and colourful commands: debates around code poetry
Code poetry, written in programming languages, belongs to electronic literature. In it, the reader faces the source code rather than the executed result. The main debate within “codework” revolves around executability: whether the poem can be interpreted by the machine and generate an output. Traditionally, works that compile and produce visual or verbal effects are valued more, as they engage both machine processes and human reading. This article revisits the discussion through ./code --poetry (2023) by Daniel Holden and Chris Kerr, arguing that every screen reading is a surface reading, even when using programming languages. It then explores its link with concrete poetry and the OuLiPo movement, highlighting how, by using languages designed for unambiguous commands, code poetry interrupts their usual function and exposes the hidden materiality of these tools.
Copyright (c) 2025 María Garay Arriba https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-nc-sa/4.0
Composing Across Disciplines: A Praise of the Antidisciplinary
Historical contemporary music (that which has been progressively institutionalised and academised since 1945) has maintained a strong attachment to the concept of absolute music and its unidisciplinary closure which, at the latest, would have been defined in the mid-nineteenth century (Hanslick). This text raises and explores possible ways out of this situation through different ways of relating between disciplines and its corresponding questioning of those paradigms of the disciplinary practice defined by Rancière in his text ‘thinking between disciplines’: territory, mediality (objects) and their consequent methods. From the closed idea of discipline, a path of defined relations (unidiscipline, incidental relation, multidiscipline, interdiscipline and transdiscipline) will therefore be proposed, which will ultimately reach its own negation in the idea of anti-discipline, insofar as a doing that is conscious of the borders in which the different disciplines are inscribed and which, from this conscience, deliberately erases them in a search for a doing that goes beyond media, methodological and territorial preconceptions.
discipline, multidiscipline, interdiscipline, transdiscipline, antidiscipline
Copyright (c) 2025 Alberto Bernal https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-nc-sa/4.0
This project explores the origin, evolution, and impact of the Tetamundi, a work created in 2017 as part of a “breastcentric” speculative design exercise. Inspired by myths about the creation of the Milky Way, it transforms the female breast into a planetary symbol, displacing patriarchal narratives and proposing new symbolic futures. After its public appearance at the Benidorm Fest 2022 alongside Rigoberta Bandini, Tetamundi went viral and became a collective icon, sparking debates about authorship, cultural appropriation, and symbolic power. The project engages with artists who hack everyday objects to re-signify them, activating critical discourses on artifacts, the body, and power. Using the Visual Archive Research methodology, ideas are analyzed, connected, and extracted from the images, demonstrating how Tetamundi transcends its original context to become a dynamic entity continually reconfigured by the communities that adopt and reinterpret it. Through its visual and symbolic hybridization, the planetary breast merges design, mythology, activism, and digital culture. This approach aligns with the spirit of contemporary hybrid practices, which blur the boundaries between disciplines and open new forms of expression at the intersection of languages and media.
Art, Hacking, Feminism, Popular Culture, Icon
Copyright (c) 2025 Marina Salazar https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-nc-sa/4.0
“Thinking is a revolutionary act”: the artist’s publications of Marie Orensanz
After beginning her career as a painter in the 1960s, in the 1970s and 1980s Argentine artist Marie Orensanz (La Plata, Argentina, 1936) issued a significant number of artist’s publications alongside her sculptural and pictorial practice. These publications, almost always produced in small print runs, were created at a time when the conceptual take that had begun to transform artistic practices in the United States and Europe in the 1960s was expanding and broadening, and many artists were incorporating printed formats into the various media they used for their work. This text analyses Orensanz’s artist’s publications, which have remained relatively unknown until now: editions of postcards, posters and books that, in addition to being closely related to the artist’s drawings, paintings and sculptures, could – and should – also be framed within the general genealogy of artist’s books and experimental publishing.
Marie Orensanz; artist’s publication; artist’s book; experimental publishing; artist’s manifesto
Copyright (c) 2025 Mela Dávila Freire https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-nc-sa/4.0
Among the vast array of public demonstrations that emerged in the wake of the social uprising of October 2019, many relied on the written word as their primary medium, through graffiti, wall art, light projections, and phrases disseminated on social media. Subsequently, numerous critical analyses and compilations of these expressions arose, as well as compilations of what could be called their flip side, such as the controversial statements made by politicians in the days leading up to the outbreak. Within this verbose landscape, I would like to discuss the creative process behind my book, La realidad es simple (2020), which comprises a selection of statements made in the Emol forum in response to news of the political situation during the first weeks following the uprising. I will draw comparisons with other similar models, like Diarios del odio by Roberto Jacoby and Syd Krochmalny specifically addressing editorial choices and distribution formats.
Copyright (c) 2025 Felipe Cussen https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-nc-sa/4.0
Connections between opera, cinema, video-opera and audiovisuals in contemporary music
In the context of a hybrid world in continuous transformation due to the great impact of technology and the digital revolution, we will begin by analysing two interdisciplinary artistic forms such as opera and cinema, explaining how these have merged throughout history. First, avant-garde opera introduced projections or cinematographic techniques integrating the image in a totally new way. Later, with the birth and consolidation of sound cinema, opera will be directly filmed and converted into cinema, although as will be explained, operatic art is already present with the birth of cinema. These two options can be understood as direct antecedents of a recent genre such as video-opera. Other hybrid options will be when the libretto of an opera is directly based on a film, as well as operatic creations that introduce the screen into the stage as the main element. The boundaries between genres will be erased when analysing other audiovisual proposals that are currently being developed outside of any classification.
opera, cinema, video-opera, audiovisual, interdisciplinary
Copyright (c) 2025 Joan Gómez Alemany https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-nc-sa/4.0
Turmoil image. About the cumulative memory of video-image
Turmoil image is an immersive compilation of fragments of memories after the act of scrolling down a vertical video-base social media. The interaction with the phone as a device of image consumption leaves the user with mixed feelings because of the superposition of time and space: everything is happening everywhere all at once and it’s a rhythm that affects us. There’s a bittersweetness to it, something that keeps us stuck in the scroll. The images we touch become attached to us, but always as an already fading memory. Enchanted by this image based memory, the turmoil image is something that makes us confused, but at the same time, we can’t stop watching. We have become used to everything being in perpetual movement, always on loop — there are multiple videos being played right now somewhere near us. This visual essay pretends to generate questions on how the vertical video era is affecting our sense of memory: what happens between the video-image and the conscience?
Copyright (c) 2025 Libe Belandia Juaristi https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-nc-sa/4.0
Artist’s book in the digital age: New hybridizations and transmedia strategies
The artist’s book has evolved from a space of interdisciplinary experimentation to a medium that crosses boundaries between artistic disciplines. Originally, it merged visual poetry, experimental text, and graphics. This evolution continues with the arrival of digital technology, adopting a multimedia and transmedia character that defines the contemporary artistic landscape. The digital era offers new forms of artistic creation, increasing interaction and audience participation, redefining authorship, materiality, and the relationship between the viewer and the artwork. The emergence of digital formats like e-books and NFTs challenges the traditional concept of the artist’s book based on paper and the codex format. This transformation promotes a democratization of art, allowing greater accessibility and distribution, and opening new participatory experiences not only through the format but also through the spaces in which it is viewed. Users become co-authors of the work, generating immersive and unique experiences. Despite challenges in conservation, the expansion of digital artist books ensures that this genre remains relevant in contemporary artistic practice as technology continues to advance.
Copyright (c) 2025 Virginia Pérez Nieto https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-nc-sa/4.0
Embodied Engagement: Expanded Sensibility and Aesthetic Experience in Hybrid Art
This article explores how contemporary hybrid arts reconfigure aesthetic experience through disordered attention, a decentering of hegemonic vision, and the active involvement of the body. From a transdisciplinary perspective that brings together aesthetics, philosophy, queer theory, science, and posthumanism, it argues that these practices destabilize disciplinary, sensory, and epistemic hierarchies. Drawing on the work of Judith Butler, Walter Benjamin, Claire Bishop, Karen Barad, and N. Katherine Hayles, it examines how attention, perception, and subjectivity are shaped by visual, technological, and affective regimes that colonize imagination and desire. In contrast, hybrid arts emerge as zones where the repressed reappears: non-normative knowledge, dissident bodies, and impure materialities. Far from passive contemplation, these practices activate an embodied, opaque, and relational sensitivity capable of resisting the capitalist capture of attention and imagining new ways of being. The critical force of hybrid arts lies precisely in their ability to unsettle, overflow, and reprogram meaning. In this context, the body becomes a living and political interface where perception, affect, and knowledge intertwine in an expanded experience of the world.
Copyright (c) 2025 Júlia Lull-Sanz https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-nc-sa/4.0
Based on both her own and others pieces of language, (KOP, Luz Pichel, Rimbaud, Delta 9, Daniel Durand, Hélio Oiticica, Fernanda Laguna), En sí del no questions the possibility of a relationship between poetry and insurrection, fire and poetic image, beyond the analogy of both as events that transform the understanding of a given (semantic or political) order, within a genealogy of negation. This it could well start with the Paris Commune and reach the first quarter of the 21st century, pierced by the disruptions of feminism, tentatively pushing the notion of “expanded writing” towards the world understood as the expressive mold and unmold of the language in which poems and riots are emitted.
Expanded Writing, Feminism, Insurrection, Language and Poetry
Copyright (c) 2025 María Salgado https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-nc-sa/4.0
Art as counter-truth: intersections between artificial intelligence, artistic practices, and contemporary epistemologies
This essay analyzes the contemporary reconfiguration of the concept of truth in a context marked by artificial intelligence (AI) and neoliberal structures. Its main objective is to explore how these technological and political dynamics transform truth, challenging its traditional definition and affecting its understanding in everyday life and artistic practices. To this end, an interdisciplinary approach is adopted, combining critical theories such as those of Nelson, Wittgenstein, Brown, and LaViers, which allow us to conduct a contemporary analysis of the impact of AI on society and art. Likewise, it showcases some artistic practices that move in this direction, such as those of Stephanie Dinkins or Vladan Joler and Kate Crawford. The research focuses on the epistemological and cultural changes caused by digital acceleration and neoliberalism, observing how truth is questioned in art. The findings allow us to identify the conversion of truth into a commodified object, controlled by neoliberal dynamics, with AI as a central actor in this process. The role of art as a space of resistance against the manipulation of truth is discussed. Finally, it advocates for an ethical (digital) approach to AI that promotes critical thinking. With this analysis, the aim is to invite reflection in favor of other common alternatives on which to collectively rethink the idea of truth. Other alternatives where values are established from perspectives not subordinated to authoritarianism and hierarchical manifestations of domination.
Artificial Intelligence, Truth, Feminism, Art, Society, Amy LaViers, Stephanie Dinkins
Copyright (c) 2025 Livia Daniel https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-nc-sa/4.0
The question of what thinking means has been central to philosophy since its origins and remains so today, evolving from the primacy of conceptual thought to the growing relevance of visual thinking in the present. The author proposes a reflection on the need to expand our conception of thinking, incorporating non-discursive forms. Contemporary crises highlight the need to think in other ways. Among these, we must vindicate the importance of aesthetic modes of thinking, recognizing that thought manifests itself beyond concepts and words. The author explores the differences between “thinking on,” “thinking in,” and “thinking with” images. The author defines “thinking with images” as the creation of an inseparable unity between image and concept, an “iconotext.” As a precursor, the work of Salvador Dalí is analyzed, especially his book “The Tragic Myth of Millet’s Angelus,” as a paradigmatic prototype of this form of thinking. Through his work, Dalí demonstrates his ability to think about, think in, and think with images, weaving a complex visual and textual discourse. The possibility is raised that Dalí is a precursor to new forms of philosophical expression, in keeping with contemporary visual culture. Finally, the author reflects on the potential of philosophy to incorporate “thinking with images” into its practice, following the example of authors such as Bataille and Foucault.
Copyright (c) 2025 Gerard Vilar https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-nc-sa/4.0
The in(visible) music: Music, synesthesia, abstraction and female composers
“The in(visible) music” is an interdisciplinary art project that explores the relationship between music and visual art through synesthesia and abstraction. The project, developed by artist Andrea Lerma Casany in collaboration with musicologist Inmaculada Martínez Ayora, culminated in an exhibition that presented abstract paintings inspired by works from eight female composers from the 16th to the 20th centuries. Building upon Lerma's previous research on synesthesia in composers like Olivier Messiaen and Wassily Kandinsky's color theories, the exhibition combined traditional painting with digital elements, allowing visitors to listen to the musical pieces while observing the resulting works. The project, exhibited at the Museu de la Rajoleria in Paiporta (Valencia) in March 2024, demonstrated the potential of interdisciplinary approaches to make classical music, specifically that of female composers, more accessible to general audiences. The project's innovative approach to presenting works by female composers through visual art has generated interest from academic institutions and opened new possibilities for music appreciation and education.
Copyright (c) 2025 Inmaculada Martínez Ayora, Andrea Lerma Casany https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-nc-sa/4.0
*]:pointer-events-auto [content-visibility:auto] supports-[content-visibility:auto]:[contain-intrinsic-size:auto_100lvh] scroll-mt-[calc(var(--header-height)+min(200px,max(70px,20svh)))]" dir="auto" tabindex="-1" data-turn-id="2cf4b64f-2788-48ff-bbd3-f6d480f1e1ec" data-testid="conversation-turn-2" data-scroll-anchor="true" data-turn="assistant"> Music from Somewhere (Fran MM Cabeza de Vaca, 2017–2019) is a work for pianist’s hands, light, and electronics that explores silence, memory, and gesture as sonic materials. The absence of the physical piano turns the performer’s body into a mediator between sound, light, and space, shifting the focus from sound emission to the pre-gesture—that perceptual state preceding visible movement. In this sense, the performer’s body functions as a transducer in the Simondonian sense: an agent that modulates energies and produces transformation. The piece thus unfolds as an intermedia and hybrid practice. Its hybridity does not stem merely from technological use, but from the cognitive, aesthetic, and bodily fusion of heterogeneous media (light, memory, gesture, sound). From an intermedial perspective—after Higgins and Citton—the work invites inhabiting a space between media, a state of in-mediate experience that blurs the boundaries between body, technique, and memory. In doing so, it displaces pianistic tradition toward a performative territory where perception, touch, and remembrance converge in a shared experience between performer and audience, rendering visible the bodily, temporal, and sensorial dimensions of absent music.
Hybridity, performativity, Music from somewhere, intermedia
Copyright (c) 2025 Haize Lizarazu, Carmen Pardo https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-nc-sa/4.0
Nobody Move! Without Television There is no Nation
In this essay we will show the social and political assemblage that made possible the first Mexican satellite called Morelos I, which symbolically marks Mexico’s entry into the neoliberal era and the empowerment of Televisa as the producer of the Mexican hegemonic visuality. Through a brief contextual review, we will locate some of the symbolic, political, economic, material and technological paradoxes that drove and made possible the existence of Morelos I during its eight years of life. Based on this, we propose an exploration of four topics that can help us look at the Morelos I framework. First: The dazzling media corresponding to the audiovisual culture that formed the identity of a nation. Second: The political irradiation, whose magnitude produced a generalized social displeasure thanks to the government in office’s decisions. Third: The economic shadow under which the project was financed. A huge investment for the purchase of the satellites that did not cover the necessary technological structure required on the ground. Finally: The remoteness and technological obscurity with which this type of devices operate, that makes them unintelligible and undecipherable objects, invisible to the vast majority of the population.
Copyright (c) 2024 Ilana Boltvinik, Rodrigo Viñas Miranda https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-nc-sa/4.0
We share images among humans with machines, the biosphere and stones as witnesses.
If anything characterizes the ecological turn printed in Peter Szendy's For an Ecology of Images (Shangrila editions, 2023) it is a stewardship of words: in his brevity, in anecdotes that become essay and then theory; in his fondness for neologisms (many actually revitalized archaisms), Szendy recycles and puts words together, gives them new meaning and throws them back into circulation.
Copyright (c) 2024 Mauricio Patrón Rivera https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-nc-sa/4.0
Tell me more... Image and cultural (me)mediation
In this essay I reflect on the contact zones between art and memes. In addition to analyzing cases in which art adopts the memetic logic and aesthetics, the text covers some milestones in the history of Internet memes. Besides, I also presents a partial narrative of the exhibition #ElMemeEstáEnLaTrienal!, which I curated in 2015 as part of the 4th Bienal Poli/Gráfica de San Juan América Latina y el Caribe. Some of the topics discussed in light of that experience are the culture wars, digital activism and the technology gap.
Copyright (c) 2024 Diana Cuéllar Ledesma https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-nc-sa/4.0
Image, body, politics: a conversation with Alejandra Castillo
El interés por dialogar con Alejandra Castillo parte de la siguiente inquietud inicial: ¿Qué nos puede decir la pregunta por la práctica de la filosofía sobre el uso y construcción de las imágenes? ¿De qué manera la producción social de imágenes podría poner en crisis la propia práctica filosófica? Me parece que ahondar en el trabajo de Castillo es una oportunidad para tejer esos puentes entre la forma en la que la filosofía ha construido un modo de ver y la producción y circulación de imágenes ligadas a una matriz de pensamiento masculinista. Me ha interesado particularmente la manera en que Castillo piensa las imágenes a partir de interrogar un orden androcéntrico de la filosofía o, dicho de otro modo, de cómo la manera en que se construye la mirada está estrechamente relacionada con cómo definimos las categorías del mundo desde un orden androcéntrico propiciado, entre otros elementos sociales, por la práctica filosófica que prioriza la razón sobre el cuerpo y la materia, excluyendo otros cuerpos y experiencias disidentes.
Copyright (c) 2024 Tania Valdovinos Reyes, Alejandra Castillo https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-nc-sa/4.0
Exhausting the Gaze. Interfaces of Images in the Video Essays “My Mulholland” (J. McGoff, 2020) and “Watching The Pain of Others” (C. Galibert-Laîné, 2018)
This essay explores the transformations in our ways of seeing images and their implications for contemporary visual culture. It proposes to rethink the relationship of gaze, materiality of the image, and the possibilities of imagination. Instead of simply trying to find new displacements of the gaze, this text offers a reflection on the materiality of images and their remediations in order to open the potential of imagination. The central site that the gaze occupies to address images in visual studies is set into question, especially tackling the images of female bodies. In order to develop this notion, two video essays are brought forward for analysis: My Mulholland (2020), by Jessica McGoff, about the fears of watching David Lynch’s Mulholland Drive (2001) as a female teenager, and Watching The Pain of Others (2018), by Lého Galibert-Laîné, a visual diary that tries to make sense to their fascination for Penny Lane’s film The Pain of Others (2018). Both video essays are bringing forth the spectatorship of an existing film and remediate them, they put them back into the medium, inserting their gaze within the image. These critical video essays question the act of looking by exploring the interfaces of their images –that is, the material sites of contact or limit between two media. It is from that place, I argue, that the possibilities of an imagination that exhausts the gaze can be engaged.
surface, interface, remediation, imagination, video essay
Copyright (c) 2024 Edwin Culp https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-nc-sa/4.0
Expresión y apreciación artísticas: an Educational Book for Artistic Mediation by Juan Acha
This article analyzes the book Expresión y apreciación artísticas, developed by art critic and theorist Juan Acha (1916-1995), in order to identify the strategies of this educational mediation project in Mexico. The structure of the text enunciates, first, Acha’s pedagogical stance to emphasize his commitment to critically study the art system in its totality, from production to distribution and consumption of creative practices. Secondly, it briefly describes the political context in which the book’s design was conceived, under the auspices of the reforms that led Mexico to neoliberal dynamics in all its sectors. Thirdly, it analyzes the structure and visual composition of the educational book to demonstrate the tension between Acha’s critical thinking and the demands of the neoliberal reforms that had to be expressed in school textbooks. As final considerations, it is emphasized that, despite its contradictions with Acha’s more critical and political work, the book constitutes a valuable experiment to approach artistic expression and appreciation from a perspective not exclusive to authorized voices, providing tools for a young and non-specialized public to develop their own sensibility and to appropriate the aesthetic practices of their environment.
Juan Acha, educational book, pedagogy, art, Mexico
Copyright (c) 2024 Minerva Salguero Gómez https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-nc-sa/4.0
Las artes en la intersección. Hibridaciones y propuestas intermediales en el arte actual
Desde hace unas décadas (y especialmente en la era digital) encontramos ejemplos de diferentes artes que intentan ampliarse desbordando los límites que las disciplinaban. En este sentido, nos encontramos con una serie de propuestas que solo se entienden desde la hibridación formal, es decir, que ya no encajan como desviaciones de una categoría (poesía visual, arte conceptual, etc.), sino que se constituyen como tal. Esto supone un reto teórico e institucional para acoger y comprender los límites, alcance y derivas de las disciplinas artísticas. En este sentido, se propone no solo la revisión formal y lingüística de las artes, sino también los modos de producción y rol de la persona creadora, de la conservación de proyectos y obras o la modificación de la percepción y despliegue de la imaginación a partir de modos críticos de pensar lo visual.
hybrid arts, intermediality, digital culture, intermateriality, multimediality
Copyright (c) 2024 Marina Hervás https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-nc-sa/4.0
Remediations of the Image: Audiovisualizations and (Dis)Appropriations of the History of Art and the Visual Culture
The appearance of the television series Ways of Seeing in 1972, and the subsequent book of the same name, represented a radical intervention in the canonical narratives of art history that quickly became a project as admired as it was criticized. More than fifty years later, Ways of Seeing continues to arouse interest for the irreverent strategies it implemented: image remediation and montage, collaborative writing, modes of (dis)appropriation, and other non-linear ways of narrating art history from critically situated experiences. Although these characteristics positioned Ways of Seeing as a crucial reference in the English-speaking world, in the Spanish-speaking context this influence does not seem to have had the same extent. In order to contribute to the debate on the relevance and validity of Ways of Seeing, the seventh issue of Umática integrates a set of reflections on different remediations of images, especially from Latin America and Spain. These are investigations based on exercises and experiments that dodge the conceptual and institutional architecture of authorship, ownership, genius and the male gaze, among other characteristics of the canon of Western art history. In order to approach the remediation of images from this particular perspective, we have situated the debate around two fundamental notions: the audiovisualization of art history and the (dis)appropriation of visual culture. As complementary processes, these notions operate transversally throughout the different discussions of this monograph. Following Ways of Seeing, this issue brings together works that go beyond disciplinary boundaries and admit approaches such as the political philosophy of the image, feminist positions, reflections on audiovisual ecologies, reconceptualization of archives, critical pedagogy initiatives and other theoretical and methodological perspectives that, from their hybridity, venture into the various experiments opened up by the processes of audiovisualization of art history and (dis)appropriation of visual culture. This is neither a tribute nor an exhaustive review of Ways of Seeing, but rather the exploration of its possible remediations, contradictions and readjustments, more than fifty years after its appearance and in latitudes that surpass its frame of origin.
Copyright (c) 2024 Renato Bermúdez Dini , Marilyn Payrol Morán, Alma Cardoso Martínez https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-nc-sa/4.0
S-colpire, un-hitting. Uncarving the female figure
Under the patriarchal regime, diverse discourses and practices are combined in order to produce, strengthen, legitimize and reproduce the subjugation of women; from physical violence, brutality exercised on their bodies and lives, to the most sophisticated and seductive artifices. In the aim of tracing the weight that represents for women the ideal of beauty from antiquity to the present day, my research focuses on the relationship between classical statuary and the iconography of fashion magazines addressed to a broad female audience, pointing out in the silent and constant presence of the mandate of beauty a function analogous to that of the caryatids in the support of the heteropatriarchal order building. The objective of the present work could be synthesized in this linguistic resource applied to the Italian verb scolpire (to sculpt, to carve): by separating the initial “s” with a hyphen, the pun uncovers another verb within it, colpire (to hit, to knock). Since in Italian the letter “s” at the beginning of a word can have a privative value (as in English the prefixes “un-“ or “in-“ usually do) the idea we seek to suggest is that of “un-hitting”, that is, to turn around, reverse, disrupt, undo that violence.
Copyright (c) 2024 Elo Vega https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-nc-sa/4.0
Transmission and Distance: Unveiling Artistic Fax Collaboration and Circulation of Images
The advent of the fax machine brought about a revolution in the art, providing artists with new avenues for creative expression, communication, and research. It did give rise to groups of artists, mainly belonging to the Mail Art and Copy Art movements, who exploited the fax machine to instantly transmit works usually created on the basis of the xerographic language of photocopy machines from the 1970s to the 1990s. The fax was used not only as an artistic tool, but also to develop new strategies for art collaboration and circulation. This new way of production, collaboration, and distribution gave rise to the graphic language of poor images stemming from the technical processes in fax creation exchanges. These poor images had low resolution, distortion, degradation, visual noise, and image deterioration – elements that became part of the graphic language inherent to the machine’s media specificity. The main objective of this text is exploring collaborative strategies with fax machines to highlight the resulting graphic language, and their value in art and image circulation. It also aims to examine how collaboration was central, as both sender and receiver were needed in the process. For this purpose, the research draws mainly from original materials and the artistic fax collection held by the International Museum of Electrography - Center for Innovation in Art and New Technologies (MIDECIANT) in Cuenca, Spain, which was a pioneering center in new technologies during the 90’s, including fax practices.
Transmission, Collaboration, Graphic Language, Fax Machine, Fax Art
Copyright (c) 2024 Beatriz Escribano Belmar https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-nc-sa/4.0
Television’s assault on art history. Ways of seeing in the dispute over the property of art images
Starting from the scarce critical reception in Spanish of the documentary series and book Ways of Seeing (WoS, 1972), and departing from the dominant Anglo-Saxon interpretations, this article argues that its relevance lies not so much in its subject matter as in the way it challenged the ownership of works of art and academic authority through an audiovisual assault on the artistic canon. Unlike other proposals, WoS would not have used television to uphold the academic account of art, but would have found in audiovisual mediation the possibility of freeing its images from the authority of experts and the ownership of elites in order to favour heterodox experiences. This argument is spelled out by a) reconstructing the position offered in WoS regarding the way audiovisualization defies the ownership and authority of art images; b) situating its invitation to raid the artistic canon in post-1968 debates in the work of Hans Magnus Enzensberger, Oskar Negt and Alexander Kluge; and c) inscribing WoS in a broader attempt to form a public countersphere that would contest the legal and material ‘intellectual property’ order that regulated audiovisual mediations at the time.
John Berger, Hans Magnus Enzensberger, Oskar Negt, Alexander Kluge, Intellectual property
Copyright (c) 2024 Alberto López Cuenca https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-nc-sa/4.0