ViewSonic

Some animals can see by hearing: they can hear images or, we might say, hearview. However, we shouldn’t mistake hearview with preview because in this exhibition by Alexandre Estrela we head straight for the main dish without any appetizers at the entrance or desserts at the exit. 

 The dish is composed of the liminal space that simultaneously separates and unites vision and hearing: a perceptual short-circuit aimed at trapping the normative sensory system. To this end, it uses the two senses as opposite poles, abusing them in order to generate feedback that grows until it saturates comprehension capacity. 

 As though guided by a machine of light (1), each eye gains autonomy from its counterpart. Then, having reached this advanced point of speculation, the brain asks, “What happens to the plaice when its eye changes place?” 

 The exhibition responds to this question with a set of conceptual knots whose sum, first and foremost, is somatised in the circular sensorium of Plant Circle. In this piece, circles circumscribe two different moments in a video of an indoor plant. When the circles intersect, they merge and a sonic vision (2) emerges: the plant sings – just as when the sound of thunder destroys the image of its outburst, just as when an immense mass of heat melts the apparatus used to measure it, opening up the possibility of a rebellion of the improper against its place in the world. The fullness of the world is the opposite of its foulness, foul is its exterior. 

 Likewise, in Entrada/Saída, one remains outside the cave only to realize that the foul cave is actually inside those who observe it. There, where it’s too early to enter and too late to exit, one hears the sound of the duct resonating in an echo, uniting all dimensions in a static movement of halted acceleration. Once again, the pairs are confounded and the polarities are short-circuited. 

 Having broken the apparatus, we reach Barómetro. This piece attempts to create a system that can notate the light reflected in the lens of a video camera – an optical aberration known as lens flare – using a tool from the field of ‘pataphysics’, the science of imaginary solutions: the clinamen.  

 The clinamen is the experience of an indeterminate event in a displaced specificity, which  itself against its codification. It is the small aberration in the system (the lens flare) that produces the exception, seen here under the light of an experience of subjectivity. This subjectivity is precisely the experience that escapes notation because it is impossible to code. Barómetro contains the leftovers of the demonstration of this impossibility. 

 Having left these leftovers, we arrive at Tapeworm. The stale image of the cobra swallowing its own tail is here devoured by its parody: the game Snake (3), just as when the word snake is corrupted by the word naked. The snake that loses the s of sense to gain the d of naked dance. The dance of the senses? Or deaf senses in a blind dance? Or a deaf dance of blind senses? 

 Naked City is John Zorn’s cult band, a composer Estrela referenced in his 2001 piece No.Jo (4). In Tapeworm, the artist returns to another of the composer’s projects: Cobra. Cobra is the name of a notation system Zorn created to direct a collective of improvising musicians that is also a game (5) – a methodological device whose rules serve the purpose of generating live music. One dies in the game of Snake when the animal’s mouth bites a part of itself. Tapeworm, by contrast, has no end. In this piece, the algorithmic generation of a moving tapeworm creates a flow of sounds far beyond its projection, as this generation is already carved in the surface of its screen, a metal plate with an engraved circuit. Tapeworm is a fossil from the future, uninterruptedly emitting a vast, exquisite corpse of songs of birds flying towards extinction, songs that are accompanied by the echo of their ancestors – the dinosaurs – whose memory remains active inside paper dictionaries. For every closed thesaurus, an open dinosaurus. 

If, in the words of António Aragão, poetry begins where the air ends, then Tapeworm can also be said to begin when the game of Snake ends. Tapeworm is the osseous structure that tapeworms do not possess, but whose memory remains active inside the body of the metal plate, from the fineries of the origin to the primordium of the absolute. In other words, it is a retroactive hysteresis perpetually swallowing the hysteria of the Big Bang. What does the digestion of the Big Bang sound like during evacuation on the dish? 

(1) This machine of light is a video projector, specifically the ViewSonic Pro7827HD model, to which the artist pays homage in this exhibition. 

(2) VIEWSONIC is the title of the exhibition this text addresses.  

(3) Snake is a video game created by Taneli Armanto in 1998 that was included in the operating system of the Nokia 6110 cell phone.  

(4) No.Jo is the contraction of No More John Zorn, a video by Estrela comprising images and sounds from Naked City‘s Torture Garden album.  

(5) Echoing performances of Zorn’s Cobra, Estrela invited a series of musicians to let themselves be led by the piece. Grouped in small trios, the musicians responded to the invitation in a marathon of mini-concerts that took place on the stage of the Teatro São Luiz in Lisbon during the afternoon of November 3, 2024.