The Creators Project

A Chat with Ricardo Carioba

How did you make the transition from those types of traditional mediums to the more amorphous elements that make up your current work?
It was the desire to transform things, and to transform by generating a doubt, in the sense of posing a question and that question being transformative, to the extent that people would have to face it. I didn’t want to build representations. I started questioning the notion of art as representative because it reminded me of feelings that had already been felt before. That led me to abstraction.

Can you tell us about the project you’re working on right now?
I’m creating sounds that annul other sounds, by developing sound waves with inverted phases. Noise is something unpleasant, not harmonic, it is the filth of city living, it is the motorcycle we hear in the middle of a conversation that stops us from being heard. Noise is disruptive. That’s where my interest lies, in that moment of interruption.

How did you get turned on to technology when all of your training is in the arts?
Technology has always been present in artistic production. You can take a piece of paper and fold it and develop a very real technology in how you work with that piece of paper. Technology is any technical procedure that has some thinking connected to it. You can think of new technologies, new means and methods of artistic production. You have artists from the 1970s who wrote the instructions for their installations on paper and those same installations are still carried out on the walls of galleries today.

How does using a computer as your primary tool affect your artwork?
The computer makes millions of calculations per second. I don’t know what those calculations are, and I don’t control them. I operate buttons, simulated buttons in most software nowadays, and so on. These buttons are interfaces created so that I can operate my machine. I am the engineer of my ideas, but the computer enables me to play them back at myself.

What do you think it means to be an artist now, as opposed to in the past?
You have reality, and you have the dream world. The artist is the person who confuses everything and can sometimes think reality is the dream and the dream is reality, and get away with it. This confusion is precisely where art is, for me. Once I began intentionally stopping my photography from registering a certain moment, I became free from that limited function of photography. There are so many options now, so many different entrances into the dream. Photography got me into video, and video encouraged me to project not just images but also sounds into space. I use electronic equipment to get to the essence of a sound or light or image.

Constructivism seems to be an influence in your work.
I’ve spent a lot of time walking in São Paulo. The sidewalks in São Paulo are designed to reflect the geometric nature of the city, and as I walked I was was watching the sidewalks. So I guess constructivism subconsciously became a part of my work.

What other movements or artists have influenced you? Do you think of yourself as a Brazilian artist?
I don’t have a lot of readily apparent influences. You go to a lecture and you hear someone speak and that person influences you whether you realize it or not. I do have a strong connection with Brazil to the extent that I’m Brazilian and live in this society. What is Brazilian art today? I think it is an art that is in conversation with the world, it is an art in dialogue with everyone on the planet. Using that definition, then I think I’m a Brazilian artist.