Whitehot Magzine: Enrique Agudo: The Cultural Artifacts Of Technology

The Alchemist by Enrique Agudo

Enrique Agudo’s (b. Madrid, Spain 1989) work explores the limits of digital media. Contemporary culture is infused with digital imagery, and Agudo’s work focuses on the pattern recognition of these digital indexes and shedding light on how they affect the way we behave. This feedback loop is never ending and constantly evolving, we see the world through digital interfaces and by extension, that is how we unavoidably understand ourselves. Agudo is the Creative Director behind The Pantheon of Queer Mythology, a VR short film that had its virtual premiere at Tribeca Film Festival 2020. Enrique Agudo continues to use immersive and experimental digital media as the tools to question and challenge anthropological discourse around identity.

Tell us about your journey from studying architecture to being a creative director for Tribeca Film Festival selection The Pantheon of Queer Mythology.

From studying architecture in London at the age of 17, I was always far more interested in what happened inside architecture than I was in design and building. I felt it was a form of storytelling that manifested in the built environment. We carve the paths of our lives in spaces that ultimately, over time, tell the story of who we are. 

While in London, I spent too much time surrounded by club kids and drag queens at nightclubs because I felt the characters that I encountered were stories that were living and breathing, unpredictable and always different, undeniably human and wittingly irreverent, and so through my studies in architecture I often tried to do the same. One year I designed the dressing room of a shapeshifting actor, and in doing so I would transform myself, taking photographs, emulating the work of Cindy Sherman, and then translating the story of that actor into how that space took shape. That is really how I understood architecture from the get go, and so as my studies in architecture went on, all the way to a Post Graduate program at SCIArc here in LA, I was always more interested in buildings that performed, in spaces that expressed identity, in the subversion of architectural conventions for ironic commentary on our culture, or outright irreverence.

In that process, technology took a bigger role in how I developed my work, I worked with new media artist Daniel Canogar for many years, and began understanding how the softwares and practices that might be used for the design of architectural details might also be used to create virtual spaces that were pungent with stories. The Pantheon of Queer Mythology began as an exploration of three obsessions of mine, technology, fashion and Queer History. I was curious to create environments that proposed allegories of what it means to be queer in today’s digital spheres. 

I started with Agoretz, a giant minotaur in a city made of swiping screens, making evident that my generation is the first generation where online platforms like Grindr or Scruff (Or MySpace and Craigslist) are the virtual spaces in which we form sexual connections, romantic relationships and even friendships. How we curate ourselves for these platforms is a distortion of who we are, hiding our insecurities and maximizing our strengths, adapting to portray an ideal that is defined by a skewed system, where whiteness and masculinity are symbols of success and likeability. My own image arguably falls into those categories, and yet the sense of inadequacy is inherent within me, and within most of us, regardless of the platform or one’s identity. Agoretz the Minotaur represents that distorted monster.

From there, I continued exploring my own observations of contradictions or misconceptions of the queer collective. From transphobia within the community and the crucial contributions of trans people to History, to exploring the possibility that legacy and memory might be more important than society's hyperfixation on defining a gender binary and that we all fall into it. Reaching Tribeca with this film in virtual reality allowed for people all around the globe to access these stories, to enter these spaces; and they hold true to my take on an architecture or built environment that focuses on storytelling.

The title of your exhibition, "Ipseity," refers to the quality of being oneself and not another. Could you speak to how this concept relates to the themes explored in your artwork and what you hope viewers take away from the exhibition?

The 8 deities in Ipseity represent speculative narratives and futures in a re-imagined world. Through extensive worldbuilding, the image of each deity presents nods and threads about difficult issues around the themes of technology, identity and mythology. Since early civilizations, human culture has repeatedly manifested spectacle and narrative about the relationship between universal unknowns and the human spirit, we rely on allegory and self reflection as a way to identify where our common ground sits and how it relates to the questions that we don’t have an answer to yet.

Mythology, religion, literature, or art throughout history contain evidence of these reflections, they are capsules of culture that are used to unravel the queries of knowledge of chemistry, physics, astronomy, meteorology, biology and technology, that are interpreted through fictions that weave the state of human identity into focus.Technology brings about the question of our relationship to it. Historically, technology has served us as a way to facilitate and advance societies, however it is in question the consideration of technology as cultural artefact. Technology in this mythology plays just as an important role as the deities at the helm.

Drawing on collaboration and design research, the deities propose an exercise of introspection and a window of insight into age-old problems that continue to be problematic in society today, and the machines are in effect, expressive and gestural so as to provide the crucial presence that technology holds in our own sense of identity. The technologies in these whimsical windows are characters as well.Each scene is constructed with a deity at the center, dressed in intricate digital costumes, in an environment or landscape, a unique collection of machine, a series of personal objects that illustrate who these characters are, what their life story is, how they encompass the themes of identity to the mythological level of deitification, to bring the human narrative to technological life.

Gender dissonance and exploration of one’s identity with the environment are major themes in your work. Tell us about your sources of inspiration?

I have always been captivated by the ways in which mythological characters and fables convey allegorical stories with moral value that allow us to reflect on the complexities of being human. From early on, I was drawn to mythology, where whimsical creatures and deities with supernatural abilities fell in love, were betrayed, fought, and lost in such stories, and was struck by the fact that the allegorical elements of these tales seemed to hold more value to audiences than the identities of the characters themselves. This fascination with the allegorical nature of myths and fables has continued to shape my understanding of the world and my own place within it, and in in the use of mythology myself, and in contemporary media, I can make a point of telling universally human stories about underrepresented characters and make visibility for these characters part of the nature of these types of media.

Growing up in conservative Spain, I was also exposed to the rich cultural traditions and rituals associated with Catholic holidays, which are celebrated with parades featuring ornate and opulent sculptures and are held in high regard for their associated costumes, music, and architecture. These rituals, which bring people together to pay tribute to the stories held sacred by religion, have always struck me as cultural spectacles that highlight the human need for moral consensus and belonging in ways that were exuberant and camp. And, in contrast, with the work of Almodovar, with his superb understanding of my own Spanish culture and his ability to pay profound respect to Spanish customs and traditions while also making light of inequalities, inconsistencies, and absurdities of these moral markers through sophisticated satire and irreverence, that I was able to see beyond the limitations of my own environment and recognize the value of making those kinds of observations about the world around me. 

The work of figures such as Francis Bacon, John Waters, Judith Butler, James Baldwin, Sylvia Rivera, the Pre Raphaelites and even Bugs Bunny, who have all explored issues of identity in their own way, also play a significant role in shaping my own sense of self and my desire to create visual stories that make allegorical questions about what it means to be human in today's technological world, and to call out the "glitches in the Matrix" of our society, particularly in relation to my queer siblings who are often less seen, to be visible and counted.

Fashion appears to be a big part of your storytelling. Would you tell us a little bit about your design process and how the garments you make enrich and support your narratives?

I became a fashion nerd the moment I saw two robotic arms spray paint on a white pleated dress at an Alexander McQueen show on the evening news. I was 9. Since then, McQueen, Galliano, and Rei Kawakubo were endless sources of inspiration. As a chubby teen I never felt my body type fit into the fashion crowd, so I would shop at H&M and sew stuff to my garments to make my clothes feel unique. It was a hot mess, but you could not tell me then I wasn’t fashion.

I think how we dress communicates identity and sensibility, it is a form of expression that can both be both high concept and deeply personal. I want my work to carry as much information as possible, but that it communicates a different narrative as the audience interprets according to their own life experience. That is what we do as humans, there is individuality in every decision that we make and for me, addressing new media art from a deeply humanistic standpoint is essential.

Postwar science fiction has greatly perpetuated the notion that the increasing presence and dependence on technology in society will ultimately lead to the downfall and dehumanization of our species. These ideas have allowed for us to normalize endless consumption and lackluster resource management, and I believe that queering that concept by not thinking of technology as ‘other’, allows us to humanize our relationship to it, to restructure technology away form a consumable accessory, and to allow it to expand our culture and make it a tool that serves our own evolution into something to look forward to. 

When we think of digital fashion as other, because of the conservatism of calling out the ”authenticity” of things in the physicality of garments, we really are shutting down technology-driven culture as not authentic, and neglecting the factual (and authentic) presence that technology has in our lives, that our online presence is a digital avatar composed of pictures or images, we tell ourselves that it's not “as real”. But I simply believe that we are reinforcing a power structure that has the ability to determine what is worthy of validation and what isn’t, which is an eerily similar dynamic that queer people have undergone, and continue to fight against. Equal to fashion, we can discuss relationships, idols, jobs, art, shopping, books, entertainment, or sex, all these are increasingly happening digitally more than physically, and those are all very much real, whether we acknowledge them as legitimate or not.

In the same way John Everett Milliais in the XIX capturing Ophelia in his painting, using a silver dress he bought for 4 British pounds to dress the fictional Shakesperian character, by making digital garments that are intricate and layered, that maintain a consistency in detail similar to traditional fashion and costuming, but that reveal aesthetics and references of today, I hope to legitimize the digital medium and possibly make the similar kinds of connections between fashion and technology that McQueen sparked in me when I was 9 years old. 

Since VR is a fairly new medium that artists such as yourself help to define, is there a guiding principle you abide by when working with this medium?

When I started working in VR, I saw a perfect window of opportunity to make VR a medium for queer narratives. Queer representation in art and culture that is purely celebratory is only very recent, and the window of empathy from mainstream culture toward queer stories has only begun to happen in the last few decades. The possibility of bringing a universal audience into the parallel worlds of the complex sum of parts that is the LGBTQIA+ identity umbrella also creates an opportunity for that audience to identify both more broadly and more concretely, to care more personally, and to respect more lovingly. As immersive media takes deeper root in our cultural and artistic paradigm, hopefully my work, and other queer cultural artifacts, can act as a cornerstone, because the empathic power of taking the viewer into these worlds makes technology the perfect channel through which to empower narratives of those who are often less seen.

What tools are useful in creating New Media art?

Any source of knowledge relating to software workflows I feel is essential to achieve a successful work practice. I always feel I am technically incapable of matching the level of conceptual and theoretical intricacy that my work carries to execute all aspects of it so I feel somewhat limited to my technical ability. I have come to really embrace that collaboration is an essential part of how I develop my work, and by doing so I am able to prioritize the creative direction rather than compromise it to where I am technically at, which with ever-evolving techniques and software improvements it would be really difficult to keep up and not lose significant substance.

The IPSEITY exhibition features digital paintings that explore contemporary notions of identity through the depiction of new deities and their environments. Could you tell us more about how you developed these deities and what ideas or values they represent?

Mythology is a fascinating narrative tool. Since the Pleistocene, humans have been telling stories filled with allegories to understand phenomena that we don't fully comprehend or to give meaning to our inner selves, to establish collective criteria. The veneration of deities and mythological characters, and the use of imagination to tell stories, is part of our nature. It has allowed us to explain the order of the ecosystem, the vastness of the universe before science, and has been the origin of human knowledge.

That's why I find it curious that, as a society, we see technology merely as a utilitarian tool, and that we don't see communities approaching technology with more existential premises. Even though the average user may not understand how Chat GPT works or the omnipresence of an all-knowing entity like Google, there seems to be a lack of spirituality or metaphysical exploration surrounding the virtual dimension. My work aims to visualize contemporary characters with complex identities, doubts, triumphs and defeats, aspirations and conflicts. They reflect part of our reality as a society, presented in a format relevant to our time, while maintaining a traditional aesthetic of painting but in a new form, with the same level of detail as a Pre-Raphaelite painting, but reflecting today's mythologies.

As in any mythology, the reality of the power it holds depends on the viewer. Some people may see these images and not feel compelled to explore the meaning behind the relationships depicted on the canvas, while others may contemplate and try to connect with the image, seeing themselves reflected or relating to a particular detail in one of the paintings. That's the power of allegory, that's the power of mythology.

On this project, I have explored themes of chosen family, addiction, sobriety, sexuality, gender or wisdom. They began as a series of interviews with a collective of people from all walks of life in my community. The most common thread in all of these interviews was that everyone felt “othered” in some way. Racial identity, gender identity, queerness, mental health… all these topics emerged in these conversations with one common thread: everyone feels they somehow don’t fit in. That’s why, in the development of this mythology, and in the process of creating these characters, I had to creat complex multi-layered people that not just personified a theme in a tokenising way, but that the composition of each scene provided enough depth for the convergence of multiple arcs that span across a myriad of issues around a persons identity.

Your work often integrates generative animations connected to real-time data, reflecting on the role of technology in our self-perception and our place in the world. How did you incorporate this aspect of your practice into the Ipseity exhibition, and what messages do you hope to convey?

Our current society classifies the digital realm as an abstraction of the physical or of lesser value compared to the physical. We prioritize our material reality far above what we access through digital interfaces, and we take for granted that our digital presence is not as legitimate as our corporeal reality. However, my interpretation of this phenomenon is different. Our global culture does not solemnly acknowledge the impact that our digital identity has on our physical reality. Human identity is filtered through the interface of technology, increasingly so every day, and it is the responsibility of the humanities and the arts to identify these phenomena in order to delve into what this impact entails. By understanding it, we can restructure our relationship with technology to establish an expansive relationship with our individual identity and, consequently, our culture.

I just mentioned mythology and ways in which the narrative tool of the allegory helps convey the relationship between things. I’ll take The Alchemist, for example. In the Greek tradition, Hebe was the goddess who created elixirs to keep the gods youthful. This concept of preserving youth is intriguing and, of course, still very present in our current reality. However, the reality for today's youth is that they are a generation whose main mission, and greatest challenge, will be (and is), to try to slow down and reverse the process of ecological decline that our planet is facing. Therefore, the alchemist is a character that refers to the Greek goddess Hebe, but instead of creating elixirs to preserve human youth, they attempt to formulate elixirs to preserve the planet.

The artwork is connected to real-time data, which means that when today's local precipitation index exceeds the index of the same day last year, the painting begins to fade in a hypnotic effect. Each piece is connected to a factor of our environment or ecosystem that is part of the exploration of each scene, and in the alchemist, a relationship is created between the reality of our rainfall index and the behavior of the piece. As our ecosystem worsens, it will rain much more or much less. The painting will reflect when the rainfall index deviates from the central axis, and thus the relationship between the narrative of this character and the reality of our planet acquires a much more tangible level of depth. And the vehicle I use to illustrate that relationship, is technology.

In the context of Vellum, we chose to present prerecorded editions of the paintings given the technical challenges implicit in presenting the real-time data editions due to the computer power necessary.

What are your hopes for the future of VR technology and New Media?

Contemporary culture is infused with digital imagery, and my work focuses on recognizing patterns in these digital indexes to shed light on how they affect the way we behave. We see the world through digital interfaces, and by extension that is how we understand ourselves. This notion is both alarming and thought-provoking. I’m interested in telling stories that can empower people to make choices about the cultures that they are a part of, to shape the direction of those cultures. I want queer identities to be included and both virtual reality and other digital media makes that far more accessible. Being in its early stages, it has the potential to be the first medium to be inclusive and intersectional from its origin. Imagine if the VR of the future includes celebratory stories of diverse and complex identities as a starting point. The process of world-building is the way we can achieve that.

As we approach the life-defining inflection point that AI will undoubtedly bring in 2023, I think it is more important than ever that we integrate the digital medium away from the ‘other’. That, as we are experiencing already, the obsolescence of hardware is merely a circumstance because our digital domains, softwares, files and artworks will be sticking around, therefore we can think of them just as permanent as our belongings. Even moreso, our ecological survival is hinging on a revolution that would see humanity reparent their relationship to itself and to the planet, pushing away systems of mindless consumption and inequality, and embracing a sharing economy that does not overwhelm our anxiety for abundance. Technology allows us to do that.

Is there anything you’d like to share with digital artists just starting out?

To be fearless in reaching out to people who they identify with, to propose collaborations and to talk about their own work with the same legitimacy that they would speak of anyone else’s work that they respected. It is a difficult practice that takes a lot of initial cringing and sidestepping apologies when sharing about one’s work, but the truth is that people out there are interested in hearing what they have to say and the work that they do, only if they can communicate that with commitment to their craft and their vision. It’s not about performative confidence, but about legitimizing that the work has been a result of a lot of training, thought and rigor; that it could technically possibly be improved, but that it has been part of an evolution, and that there is all kinds of weirdos waiting to meet other kinds of weirdos, so the hustle never stops.

I would like to team up with shamans, performers, poets, artists or stylists to explore new forms of fashion editorials, or to make totally fucked up body horror performance, dancefloor rituals, or virtual operas – whether that means using digital paintings, virtual reality, animation, experimental photogrammetry, or interactive installations. There is a lot of room to make things that are weird but that still feel strangely familiar, which is where I hope I continue to be.