immaterial girl, 2023
site-specific installation:
projection onto tulle of a digital image obtained through databending from an audio recording of Madonna’s album Music
variable dimensions
Work presented in the group exhibition Madonna, Deeper and Deeper, curated by José Maia and Sérgio Costa Araújo, at Espaço Mira, Porto, Portugal [2023].
The exhibition device created specifically for the exhibition Madonna, Deeper and Deeper, presented at Espaço Mira in Porto, seeks to reflect the issues surrounding the major transformations in regimes of circulation, while simultaneously referencing the artist’s iconography in order to foreground her role in the history of popular music.
The projected image was digitally constructed from audio data, and within it all the tracks from the album Music coexist, arranged in overlapping layers. Through an iterative and exploratory process, a chromatic set was reached that is characteristic of 1980s popular culture and associated with the Material Girl’s artistic past, marked by an excess of “plastic”, an aesthetic from which the singer sought to free herself at the turn of the millennium, as is evident in the video for the single Music.
The use of tulle as a projection material, in addition to evoking the garment worn by the singer on the cover of the album Like a Virgin—and later used in her historic and, at the time, controversial performance at the 1984 MTV Music Awards—also simulates a contemporary screen, its mesh resembling a grid of pixels.
Together, these elements form a reticular structure in which the intangible image generates different tonalities without ever becoming corporeal. It is a metaphor for the immateriality to which the musical object has been relegated in post-digital society, where a model based on ownership has given way to one based on access, at any time and from any place, to a vast, dematerialized musical repository, composed of data flows circulating across networks between users and a set of servers. Physical copies were transformed into files, and ultimately the zero degree of tangibility was reached.