Gaston Bachelard said that “we (were) in the century of the image, for good or for bad, (that) we are suffering more than ever the action of the image.” Colombian multimedia artist Daniel Escobar Vásquez decided to see the good where the body of the spectator is an actor to become One with the machine. Thanks to sophisticated programs, Daniel develops experiments between technology and the human being and where objects equipped with an interface allow the interaction between human intelligence and artificial intelligence.
The image refers to the cinema, an invention in which the man is reflected in images sometimes of illusion. It is in this sense that Daniel developed in 2011, La Sopa de Luz. Famous black and white movies are paraded on the screen. A bubble detects the presence of faces as if to feed until dying. The faces light up clearly while the rest of the screen becomes blurred. This experiment talks about the life cycle of the image. Without us, it would not exist and would not exist without it. The work of Daniel Escobar Vásquez reflects the emotional power between man and technology.
His work allows us to understand the world and its technological possibilities. Without breaking the limits, he tries to advance the complementary and sometimes conflictive relationship with science. Without losing contact with traditional media, such as books, Daniel created Libro Expandido, in 2014, he created books with a digital interface. We must see in this work a complementary way of educating people of all ages who are increasingly involved in new technologies. The work of this young artist links knowledge to scientific research with a philosophical and educational approach.
How not to unite the image with the sound? The work of Daniel Escobar Vasquez offers unexpected effects and poetically loaded as Marimba Expandida, an interactive installation of 2016. The marimba is a traditional instrument of Afro-Colombian communities composed of a wooden keyboard. From electrical sensors placed on the keyboard, each hit on a note generates an image related to Colombian customs and projected on a screen. The fusion between the sound dimension and the visual dimension brings the actor-spectator into an intimate world.
The works of Daniel Escobar Vasquez, artist-scientist or scientific-creative, express two ways of understanding the world, each in its own way, related to reality.
-Sèverine Grsojean
