El arte de escribir en el cuerpo
Based on Regina Galindo’s 2005 performance piece Perra in which she writes the word perra (bitch) on her left leg with a knife in an act of protest against the women killed in Guatemala that year, literal and symbolic writing on the body will be debated in the quest for a language that transcends meaning. At the same time, channels of communication between writing and action will be sought, because this performance is accompanied by texts that reinforce its approach.Violence will be the focus of reflection by undertaking a survey of the various pieces that the artist has developed on the subject. Finally, the question will be raised of the political or nonpolitical intention of Perra, as well as the conception of art as a political act.
The representation of the female body in the multimedia works of Regina José Galindo.
The female body is central to the performance art, poetry and blog site interventions of Guatemalan Regina José Galindo. While Galindo is best known for her performance work, this article compares the hereto overlooked, distinctive and often shocking representations of the female body across her multimedia outputs. We first consider the ways in which, in all three media, Galindo presents an ‘excessive’, carnivalised, grotesque and abject female body. Second, we analyse representations of the female body that has been subjected to violence at a private and public level. In so doing, we show how Galindo not only contests hegemonic visions of gender and (national) identity but also challenges the viewer/reader to engage with, rather than look away from, the violence to which women are subjected in patriarchal society.
FlowBrush: optical flow art
The depiction of motion in static representations has a long tradition in art and science alike. Often, motion is depicted by spatio-temporal summarizations that try to preserve as much information of the original dynamic content as possible. In our approach to depicting motion, we remove the spatial constraints and generate new content steered by the temporal changes in motion. Applying particle steering in combination with the dynamic color palette of the video content, we can create a wide range of different image styles. With recorded videos, or by live interaction with a webcam, one can influence the resulting image. We provide a set of intuitive parameters to affect the style of the result, the final image content depends on the video input. Based on a collection of results gathered from test users, we discuss example styles that can be achieved with FlowBrush. In general, our approach provides an open sandbox for creative people to generate aesthetic images from any video content they apply.