2016/9

I.

This apparatus is the result of a theoretical and poetic research, which has been influenced by the issues of free culture, the experimental uses of the media and a constellation of ephemeris.

The Fono Raggy is (among other things) an object with a plastic casing and several buttons. It is a mash-up of a telephone and a printer, almost like a fax machine, but not quite. It prints on a roll of paper (like ticket paper) a very long series of numbers that constitute the colour information of each of the pixels of a photo from Rincón de Estudio (1946), by the Argentinian painter Fortunato Lacámera. Each printed line corresponds to one pixel of the image.

But these numbers are not extracted directly from Lacámera's work; Raggy produces them by decoding a sound that arrives on the telephone line. In other words, there is software that converts Lacámera's image into a sequence of sounds and these sounds are sent by telephone line to the Raggy Phone, where they are processed again to become printed data.

This is very similar to sending a photo by wathsapp, with the difference that this device is so precarious that it only works at a speed of 5bps, so the image would be completely transferred after fourteen months. The Raggy Phone is a work in progress.

https://drive.google.com/file/d/1EbzeT0f3vc3v_lf43Pt2S4KZkQy0PbJj/view?usp=drive_link

II.

The Raggy Phone project was born out of a constellation of events that really amazed me:

1. In 1922 the Hungarian artist László Moholy Nagy ordered five enamel paintings by telephone from a factory, dictating orally the indications of shapes, sizes and colours so that they could be made entirely in the factory without the artist's physical presence. In the same year, the Argentinian Fortunato Lacámera quit his job as a railway telegrapher to devote himself fully to painting.
2. On 24 November 1946 Moholy Nagy died in Chicago at the age of 51. On the same day, Fortunato Lacámera was awarded the prize at the XXV Salón de Rosario for his painting Rincón de estudio o Naturaleza muerta, a work which from that day onwards became part of the current Castagnino+MACRo collection.
3. On 24 November 2016, on the 70th anniversary of the ephemeris 2, the LXX Salón Nacional de Rosario was inaugurated. At the opening, the first version of the Raggy Phone began to print the millions of numbers with the colour information of all the pixels of Fortunato Lacámera's Rincón de estudio.

https://drive.google.com/file/d/15PhblsuhEpC9zooQTKfXSVSc-L3tbGQD/view?usp=drive_link

III.

The precarious materiality of the device (a bit trashy, a bit sloppy) corresponds to an apology for DIY methods. It's important for it to be seen as something homemade, and not as something industrial. This is related to all my artistic production.

Leer Fono Raggy, de Fede Gloriani

Leer Ragtime, de Jorge La Ferla

Leer texto de Georgina Ricci