Glifotronik

Series of digital artwork. 1997.

Note: Fernando Birri describes the birth of glifotroniks as follows: “And the divinatory use of the electronic brush—after repeated incantations—arrived in 1996 with my first PB computer, a small portable Pandora’s box. Gray and rectilinear on the outside, it contains within all the colors and forms used in the Seven Days of Creation, and some more. I paint with my finger on its little screen, a finger that is thus transmuted into that of Michelangelo making a short-circuit with the finger of God, while rebellious angels with the nicknames of bits secretly decompose and recompose the first image I propose. Involuntary, always new, surprising and astonished, I can speak of them with this dazzled libido, because it is not I—caveman and Platonist—who makes them, but the machine touched by the grace of the Electronic Mystery. And in the age of digital reproduction, it produces these ‘serial’ clonations—if I were to use a word from the jargon of my old craft as a filmmaker, I would call them ‘sequences’: interactive metaphorical transformations that react in chain and are unleashed from the figurative to the abstract, from the formal to the formless, from purpose to purposelessness, from infinity to zero. But the light remains. Not flame, not filament, not voltaic spark, but transparency, radiance, splendor: motionless fire within the display, cold fire, mathematical fire. When will come the use of etheric hands to shape the new virtual Adam and Eve?” (translated from Spanish).

Source: Birri, Fernando and Jorge Ruffinelli, Soñar con los ojos abiertos: Las treinta lecciones de Stanford, 1st ed. Buenos Aires: Aguilar, 2007, pp. 365-366.