cefvigo gallery

Forms would become manifest insofar as they underwent metamorphosis. Each form had its own perfect sharpness, so long as it retained that form, but everybody knew that a moment later it might become something else. At the time of Europa and Io, the veil of epiphany was still operating. The bellowing bull, the crazed cow, would once again appear as god and girl. But as generation followed generation, metamorphosis became more difficult, and the fatal nature of reality, its irreversibility, all the more evident."

Roberto Calasso, "The Marriage of Cadmus and Harmony"

As can be seen from the quote above, it seems that in ancient times we lived comfortably with the idea of metamorphosis. With the progressive advance of Science since the Renaissance and up to the triumph of Positivism in the XIXth century, the idea of a mutable universe dissapears,to be replaced by a cuantifiable and fixed reality.
It seems, though, that nowadays, in a new turn of the circle, as we accept and celebrate the new advances in computer science, nanotechnology, and biogenetic engeneering, we have returned to a vision of the world as entirely mutable.
The first lines of the "Metamorphoses" of Ovid read " Of bodies chang'd to various forms, I sing ", the difference between the ancient times and ours is that while the creatures in Ovid transformed themselves from known forms into other known forms, we are poised to be transformed from known forms into unknown ones.

When Breton, in the first surrealist manifesto wrote that he believed " in the future resolution of these two states - apparently so contradictory - that are dream and reality in a sort of absolute reality, surreality." he had no way of imagining Cyberspace, which according to the architect and theorist Marcos Novak is the place "where conscious dreaming meets subconscious dreaming, a landscape of rational magic, of mystical reason...".

Cyberspace is the place where we become information, a stream of data that can be manipulated and changed at will. As the
possibilities of digitalization at every level of matter become more and more actual, Cyberspace becomes our world, no longer a distant and alien fantasy.We are now part of it, body and mind, in endless transformation and reconfiguration. What we have to accept is that the outcome of such metamorphosis cannot be always predicted or controlled.

Once both the body and the mind have been digitized to the last atom and the last bit of memory, will we be the inhabitants of a space of pure reason? Will there be room for a soul in the interstice between hardware and software? We want to believe that there will be, perhaps a tiny space that resists all reason and remains
stubbornly irrational.

In these Post-Darwinian times, as we acquire the means to re-create ourselves and the world at will, we cannot endow the new reality with pure reason only, as demanded by the logic of digits and algorythms. We must also endow it with emotion and a sense of all that which is inscrutable and can only remain mysterious. A world without mystery will certainly be more convenient, but perhaps without beauty as we now know it.

All the series in our collaborative work from 1992 to the present are but an attempt to create images that somehow confront our reality; accepting the new instruments offered by technology while at the same time trying to find a visual poetics that can be a source of mystery and emotion.

Aziz + Cucher, New York, 2002