Working within the interstices of fine art and graphic design, in addition to possessing a strong collaborative drive, Detanico & Lain have developed a practice based on the playful displacement of meaning. They do this via the language of the information age, but their wit allows them to avoid sole reliance on the complexity of technological means. Instead they make use of simple procedures in order to produce powerful visual poetics. In their interweaving of form and content, which strongly relies on language, they evoke the legacy of concrete art. However, their poetic approach owes nothing to nostalgia as it draws on irony and irreverence while the complexity of issues that it evokes relate undoubtedly to our contemporary world.

Such is the case of Utopia (2001). An early work by the duo, it consist of a type-face design to run within word processing programmes. In this type-face, capital letters are replaced by the iconic buildings of Brazil’s foremost modernist architect, Oscar Niemeyer, whilst lower-case letters are equated with urban interferences such as fences, skateboarders, CCTV cameras, electricity cables, in short, all those elements that escaped the utopian dream of the architect.

The language of the word processor is again evoked in (The World) Justified, Left-Aligned, Centred, Right-Aligned (2004). Here the Mapa Mundi is submitted to the graphic manipulations of text editing, playfully attributing to the simple descriptions of word alignments connotations of world politics.   

Detanico & Lain had already expressed an interest in the translation of image into text with Pilha (2003), where the simplicity of the process – which equates arrangements of identical objects with an alphabetical order – obscures the complexity of adapting the system within different contexts of language and culture. In producing this sculptural form of writing, the artists select objects that have a relation to the location and in some cases, such as the installation of the work in Japan, the specificities of language demanded an entirely new sculptural structure.  

Writing over an existing text, which is a form of code making, becomes the process behind The Waves (2005). This video in a loop was produced by animating the pages of Virginia Wolf’s novel which gives the work its title. Detanico & Lain wrote the phrase “what if suddenly nothing else moves?” which they then constructed from painstakingly photographing every page in which the constituent words appeared. The pages are then animated, flowing past the eye at an unreadable pace, with the exception of one word that remains, centred on the screen. The pace is determined by the number of times each word appears in the original text, so that, by coincidence or intent, the pace gradually decreases as if attempting to answer the question posed. The question of course can only exist by the very negation of what it requests.   

Winner of the Nam June Paik award (2004), Flatland (2003) is at the origin of the artists’ process of translating still images into film. The video is the product of a series of 8 video stills taken at different moments of the day during a boat trip along the Mekong River Delta. Detanico & Lain dissected each vertical pixel line stretching it so that it would occupy the entire frame. These are then placed into an animated sequence, which not only exaggerates the flatness of the landscape but produces an impression of acceleration. We experience the rise and fall of day light over the 7 minutes duration of the video and forget the fact that it is actually produced from still images. The sequence is accompanied by a concrete soundtrack that was edited from sounds ‘collected’ from the boat.

Michael Asbury, Curator

Links:

www.detanicolain.com