About Arpanet’s works.
If I had to mention one great and true legacy of the pandemic, I would undoubtedly say that Zoom meetings. That kind of meeting brought about great difficulties to identify each other in the offline world, as well as a complete distortion of time. A month or two ago I met Martín via Zoom, along with Arpanet and Garo. Their voice arrived to me frequently out of step from Tigre, where they were staying.
Arpanet takes its name from the computer network created in 1967, preceding what would later turn into the internet. Garo’s moniker comes from an analog monthly manga magazine from Japan, founded in 1964 by Katsuichi Nagai. Both are produced from what are called adversarial generative networks. This kind of construction is based on two kinds of algorithms, the Generator and the Discriminator. The first gets fed by the second, which provides an image library. The task of the first is to produce images that are as real as the ones afforded by the second one, without being the same. Advertising today uses this procedure to create content, there’s no more filming at peripheral countries, just recollecting images and remanufacturing them: creating a reality that seems more real than reality itself. The artist’s task is then to distort the images emerging from this process.
The process is central to Martín’s production, since it serves as its engine, the propeller of an interest he enjoys researching on. While in drawing one keeps a certain control of what will happen, in the aforementioned process the product is a field of possibilities. One may guide the images, but there is not as much to decide. There are expectations, but accidents are frequent and that’s what Martín tends to keep.
Around the time we met with Martín, Arpanet and Garo had watched a movie: Free Guy. It tells the story of Guy, a closed algorithm, called in the movie an “NPC”. The movie presents the story of a guy that does the same thing every day with the same motivation: to live his life looking for the love of his dreams. The breaking point in the movie comes when he actually comes across her, a hot girl wearing sunglasses and listening to a pop song. His life bursts into a thousand pieces, for that encounter was beyond the possibilities of his existence. He was programmed to search, not to find. So, he discovers who he really is and how to cope with the world by which he had been subjected. He experiences an awakening from the matrix that, unlike Neo’s, is resolved in his first attempt.
I find it fun to think about the images produced by Arpanet and Garo as cracked NPCs. “I was born and raised in front of a computer, cracking games”, Martín told me. With him, the procedure used by publicity today seems to acquire a certain autonomy, like saying “I don’t want to do any more advertisements, now I’ll make art”. It is a very pop procedure in this sense, playing with the etre of mass media functioning. Which in both, Arpanet and Garo, acknowledges the image’s generative power, not as a (retroactive) imprint, but as an (active) program.
Martín Carpaneto (Buenos Aires, 1984)
He has been working as an illustrator and audiovisual creator since 2010. His works on video were shown in music festivals in Latin America and Europe. He currently uses and teaches the use of Deep Learning tools, applying them to different media: publications, album art, archive material restoration and under his artist pseudonym: arpanet.
