CÉSAR ESCUDERO ANDALUZ EXPLORES READYMADES AND AUTHENTICITIES,  WHILE POLUTING DIGITAL SPACE
CÉSAR ESCUDERO ANDALUZ | ARTICULATE #17 | OCT 2018

READY-MADES AND AUTHENTICITIES
César Escudero Andaluz is a Spanish artist and researcher focusing on HCI (Human-Computer Interaction), interface criticism, digital culture and its social and political effects. His work spans image-making, sculpture, videogame, installation, networked culture, IoT (Internet of Things), robotics, interface appropriations and media archaeology. Since 2011 he is researching at the Kunstuniversität Linz in Interface Culture LAB. Andaluz is also the gatekeeper of a virtual space, known as A Space focusing on technology, new media and artistic research.
 
In his project Interfight / Data Polluter, Andaluz is proposing a didactic strategy making viral the Interfight intensions. It provides a larger quantity of noise information to Analysis-Trackers and Data-Brokers.

The Workshop offered by Andaluz, focuses on basic circuit development and welding. BEAM is a type of robotics that stands for Biology, Electronics, Aesthetics, and Mechanics. It works by taking the human body capacitance as input, through conductive material, and interacts with another graphical interface on capacitive surfaces like touch-screens. The contact between both interfaces, cause a physical reaction (gravity, friction, vibration).
 
Theoretically, this project is addressed to those who have concerns about critical Interfaces, new media, cultural politics and non-conformism towards the Internet data management, especially tracking Web site location and Web site analysis, design homogenization and GUI (Graphical User Interface) standards.

Interfight is a series of physical bots, designed to complicate the relationship between systems, but also a paradoxical method to emphasizes the presence of the interfaces in our lives. They provide wrong information for tracking web site location, fighting against the design homogenization and GUI standards.

Interfight becomes especially interesting when it behaves freely through the tablet operating system. It acts as intruder: clicking, opening and closing applications, taking decisions, collapsing social networks, typing random comments and posting the name of the user.

DOWNLOAD: WKSP_Interfight-Do-it-yourself-kit.

Andaluz also is the brain behind the project I WAS NOT HERE (2012), which is an action in virtual and physical space; furniture, bathrooms, walls, Webs and Blogs, by using QR (quick response) stickers. These QR stickers in turn redirected to websites of random users where it was posted pictures containing the sentence “I was here”.
  
I WAS NOT HERE is an appropriation act. It uses images generated by other people, because of the critical approach to “Having the sense to go out and take more pictures, when we can find it readymade?” Internet involves an authorship and originality crisis (Barthes, 1986); this fact should make way for the reflection on what is an author. 

Kilroy was here is an American expression that became popular during World War II, typically seen in graffiti. Its origin is debated, but the phrase and the distinctive accompanying doodle became associated with GIs (geographical identity) in the 1940s: a bald-headed man (sometimes depicted as having a few hairs) with a prominent nose peeking over a wall with his fingers clutching the wall.

"Kilroy" was the American equivalent of the Australian Foo was here which originated during World War I. "Mr Chad" or just "Chad" was the version that became popular in the United Kingdom. The character of Chad may have been derived from a British cartoonist in 1938, possibly pre-dating "Kilroy was here".

Professor, industrial physicist, author and science editor Charles Panati states as following:

"The outrageousness of the graffiti was not so much what it said, but where it turned up. In the project of Andaluz, this ‘where’ is all-over and random, manifesting the non-act and the tendencies to abandon authenticity, throughout digital citizenship."

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​The article about César Escudero Andaluz, is featured in  magazine ARTICULATE #17. You can read, download or print the full publication here below.