The Apprentice's Compass
Displacement, transportation and translation are privileged operations in the interventions by Andreia Santana, whose artistic practice develops often through experiences of physical transformation of the territory, thought according to a specific context.
Moving from a system of codes to another, from the physical world towards the virtual, consists of a shift in the ontological center of gravity of the object in question: instead of being defined primarily by its actuality (being in place and time), the entity now finds its essential constitution in an abstract field of problems: What is a virtual space? How to guide yourself within the structures of computing models?
The virtual world presents itself as an expanded field of immaterial entities constantly working to reproduce and reshape the whole human inventory. Passing from the real world toward to the virtual one, the artist find itself at a ground zero of her own discipline.
“Apprentice Compass” appears as an attempt to understand what is an online platform, or more precisely how a virtual floor is built, making use of several tutorial videos of 3D construction and topographic modulation. The tutorial videos are tools that help in the learning process, showing step by step the operation of something, like an “instruction manual”. Overlapped by the voice of a GPS (Global Positioning System), which invites us to wander and roam through the Cartesian plane, these video clips gain a subversive power: the narrative discontinuity does not allow us to reconstruct the facts, nor the places.
The Internaut / viewer follows the audiovisual flow and remains in state of doubt, attempting to reconstruct the hidden element through hypotheses and assumptions, waiting for the GPS to indicate the right way.
“Apprentice Compass” refers to an experience close to a quest of orientation and portrays a certain “Geo-Poetry” pointing to the ability of GPS mobile technologies to produce an alternative cartography out of a map without a territory.