Orb, 2021
4K vertical video, continuous loop.
After several iterations, this became the piece for YGTGITGO, an exhibition about techno curated by Sonia Fernández Pan and Carolina Jiménez. Seven vertical shots of a bonfire engendered in the depths of Daniel Benza's GPU.
This is a quote from Kenneth Rexroth in the foreword to Chermayeff and Alexander's Community and Privacy, a book I came across in 2019 in the loft of Reduct in San Francisco, a place designed by the grandson of one of the authors: «What sense of community can emerge from a society in which humanity risks are becoming a vehicle for the evolution of our artifacts?»
This was written forty-five years before smartphones. Who knows, coarse thoughts may soon be back, and doing a piece on such ultra-living element felt right after COVID. Fire is such an intimate, universal, timeless thing that it became a work about the lack of 'friction', a word I also learned to use in SF. About how easy it is to go numb staring at a campfire, a screen, or both. You tame it, it tames you back.
Work comissioned by La Casa Encendida - Fundación Montemadrid. Simulation and render by Daniel Benza. Thanks to Álvaro Chior, Angelo Freda, María Nieto and Martin Köhler.