Karlos Gil
Works
The film Origin was shot in the vast, dark passages under Madrid. Images of the hollow underground are combined with haunting deep listening music in order to interrogate the nature of time and how cinema can shape our conception of past, present and future realities. The film conjures up ghosts of Mesopotamian warriors while predicting human disasters and futuristic alien behavior. Things of ever deeper antiquity seem to wake up and begin their comeback lurking in a smooth subterranean labyrinth
In the series Redundancy, Karlos Gil works with fragments of neon recovered from old advertising signs. Archaeological remains of an endangered technology that have lost their original meaning and acquired a new one. Reflecting on the memory or biography of these recycled objects, the artist establishes analogies around the organic, addressing the presence of the passage of time in what we humans generate. In this case, the typographic forms of the pieces seem to hide a coded message. Added to this is the intermittent Morse code messages with which the neon lights activate and attempt to establish communication, walking the fine line between what makes sense and what doesn't.
In the series De–Extintion, Karlos Gil works with fragments of neon recovered from old advertising signs. Archaeological remains of an endangered technology that have lost their original meaning and acquired a new one. Reflecting on the memory or biography of these recycled objects, the artist establishes analogies around the organic, addressing the presence of the passage of time in what we humans generate. In this case, the typographic forms of the pieces seem to hide a coded message. Added to this is the intermittent Morse code messages with which the neon lights activate and attempt to establish communication, walking the fine line between what makes sense and what doesn't.
AFTERLIFE is a generative audiovisual installation that offers a technological meditation on memory and the perception of the landscape. Landscapes filmed in different locations around the world are handed over to an artificial intelligence that doesn’t simply reproduce them, but dreams, reorganizes, and reinvents them endlessly. The landscape thus becomes a suspended organism, sensitive to the presence of the viewer, breathing, mutating, and forgetting, like a memory that cannot be fully fixed. As in Romanticism, the landscape here is not simply nature, but a mirror of human interiority: immeasurable, elusive, profoundly unstable. However, where the Romantic traveler found the abyss of his solitude, the viewer of AFTERLIFE finds a living system: a technological memory that tirelessly rewrites its own past.
The main idea of Timefall is to compose sensorial encounters with the nature of time through a study of how natural and artificial bodies operate, how media affect memory and the relationship between life and death. Despite these commonalities, this work also shows an almost terrifying randomness and a desire to operate at several different points on the very edge of art since the object's ultimate purpose is its own destruction through the transmutation of matter. Each tank is programmed with unique atmospheric conditions to create a different time rhythm. The climatic atmosphere generated in each tank will shape the objects presented on it thus several processes of acceleration and deceleration of the linear time of the exhibition will be generated.
I transform the reading of these foams —normally thrown in the recycling bin—, by casting them with noble metals used in the past for making durable stuff like silver, gold or copper. These metals have different patinas in order to change their colors over time and nearly every piece is scored with deep, straight, alien lines. In this physical translation, images are generated in the negatives, the cavities and the interstices, and look more like relics —something that remains, what's left over— standing like alien devices, weirdly sensual and creaturely.
Uncanny Valley is a dystopian sci-fi film that deals with the relationship between machines and humans based on the encounter between an android and its doppelgänger, reflecting on the duality of animism and technology. It explores complex existential problems due to the Uncanny Valley Hypothesis in the field of robotics, in which an android created too much in the image and likeness of a human faces rejection.
The ongoing project Stay Gold has been made on Jacquard-type looms, the first system to automate tapestry weaving using punch cards; a direct ancestor of the computer and of current manufacturing facilities. All the sequences shown in the tapestries represent imaginary machines, hybrid fluids, haunted landscapes and magical species while conjuring up a retro–futuristic presence. This flow between different narratives weaves a web of formal contingencies between different historical moments that turn out to be closer than might be expected. The result is an image of fragmented time, a sort of network of connections between different archaeologies.
Peripheral explores the domains of yet another infraworld: the dark unknown ocean. Although the ecology under scrutiny here is one that belongs to the real world —the virtually endless lifespan of comb jellies in tropical seas—, it alludes to the sought-after condition of immortality permeating the dreams and fantasies of humankind since time immemorial. In the face of imminent extinction of various forms of life on planet Earth, Peripheral uses an Artificial Intelligence to generate infinite life cycles of a comb jellyfish— the longest living specie on Earth —, in a timeless myse–em–abyme. The AI never generates the same cycle, the film is always different depending on computer decisions. Every cycle is stored in a temporary buffer where the AI produces a real time edition.
TIMEFALL is an immersive environment of accelerated aging in which the pieces are subjected to chemical and atmospheric processes that gradually erode them. Day after day, the works change and degrade, showing that time is not a static framework, but a constant sculptor that shapes and redefines the visible.
This process of physical decomposition generates debris that is recycled into pigments to create SPECTRE, a series of drawings that evoke "technological hauntologies," ghostly visions of specters of the future that are hinted at but never fully consolidated.
The light installation “Second Sun” uses imagination and technology to generate a re–imagined landscape inside the gallery. Using references from speculative science–fiction, the installation operates as portal to a parallel new world, creating an alter narrative on our ecological future. Visitors are temporarily blinded by brightly illuminated fog when enter the space, finding a double sunset –or doppelganger sun– in the back that illuminates the whole scenario. For this installation, Gil has created an algorithmic interface that records natural soundscapes and frequencies from the internet, and transmits them to the gallery lively. These sensory data acts as a live score for the installation and creates a sort of in-between area where viewers are immersed in a nonlinear flow of sound events.
VORTEX takes us to the unknown interior of Icelandic hydrothermal volcanoes through heliography, an ancient photographic technique that uses sunlight to capture images. Paradoxically, this solar technique captures underwater spaces submerged in absolute darkness. The images, printed on aluminum plates treated with thermochromic patinas, react to the passing of the day, varying their colors according to the intensity and quality of the outside light, transforming into a true atmospheric thermometer that connects the exterior with an inaccessible and mysterious interior. These pieces react to the position of the sun, absorbing the wave frequencies specific to that moment, making them impossible to replicate and generating a completely handcrafted work that blurs the boundaries between alchemy and magic.
Fade is a generative audiovisual installation that offers a technological meditation on memory and the perception of the landscape. In this film a drone traverses abandoned fields and factories in the provinces of Lleida and Barcelona thus capturing a sci-fi nocturnal journey through deserted flour mills and decaying structures. Its flight foreshadows the obsolescence of a productive system, with the land itself bearing witness to its transformation. Images of storage sheds, empty interiors, and forsaken agricultural implements evoke a post-apocalyptic atmosphere reminiscent of a clandestine military operation, intercut with footage of illegal car races filmed in the outskirts of these same fields. The film is edited in real time using self-learning algorithms and an artificial intelligence that doesn’t simply reproduce the clips, but dreams, reorganizes, and reinvents them endlessly. The landscape thus becomes a suspended organism, sensitive to the presence of the viewer, breathing, mutating, and forgetting, like a memory that cannot be fully fixed.
Output Functions emerges from the circulation of sculptural forms across digital networks and their subsequent return to physical space through 3D printing. Sourced from online repositories, these downloaded models carry within them the instabilities of transmission: incomplete scans, corrupted surfaces, missing data, algorithmic approximations, and topological errors. What appears on screen as an accessible and endlessly reproducible image becomes, once materialized, fractured and uncertain. The sculpture records the distance between digital visibility and physical presence, exposing the latent failures embedded within systems of technological reproduction. Precision gives way to distortion; continuity breaks into seams, voids, and deformations. In this sense, L’objet de répétition operates as an archaeology of the networked image. It reflects on the contemporary status of form as something continuously uploaded, copied, compressed, translated, and redistributed across platforms. Each act of repetition produces deviation. Each transfer generates loss as much as preservation.
DEEP IMAGE consists of an immersive video installation that, through collaboration with a programmer and a neuroscientist, will decode the activity of the human brain in sequences of images. Through an artificial intelligence 'software' developed in collaboration with the Kamitani Lab of the University of Kyoto and the Laboratory of Cognitive and Computational Neuroscience of the Polytechnic University of Madrid, an immense and complete conceptual map of brain images obtained from the memories, dreams or sounds of a group of people. The main idea of Deep Image is to reconstruct the images, thoughts and memories that are formed in the brain by a deep neural network, which visualizes the information from magnetoencephalography analysis (MEG) in a video installation.