Digital arts are the main target of Museu Zer0; the very name of the Museum projects the idea of a reflexive nullity on non-existence, absence, non-presence, non-materiality. One of the consequences of thinking of a museological locus as a non-space may be the atomization of related areas – and, through this process, the multiplication of museum places. Still, as an institution, an established place, the museum must be understood and needs to assert itself as a building. Its location, still under reconstruction, rehabilitation, or renovation, are the silos of Cooperativa Agrícola, in Santa Catarina da Fonte do Bispo, northwest of Tavira, between the coast where the city lies and the Algarvian barrocal. This is a territory described in the presentation of Museu Zer0 as “mainly still agricultural, on the way to desertification” – in other words, a place in process, whose definition is not static, but changing towards demise.

Quoting Roberto Calasso at the beginning of the 21st century, we can say that the gods are “fugitive guests” of the arts. By being fuggevoli, they manage to disperse themselves – like them, the muses also like to travel through places, inhabit them fleetingly, impregnate them with their passage, hiding themselves as if playing hide and seek. Generated by the human imagination, the gods and muses ignore material, conceived, erected, concrete borders. They despise the very concept of limit, definition, or definitiveness. Everything for them is fluid, between the past and the future.

In How Computers Imagine Humans, 2017, João Martinho Moura projects the human being as it is constructed within and from thinking machines. The face defines the human, it is the element that the computer investigates and seeks to replicate. Martinho Moura – who worked with Museu Zer0 in 2019 – uses two computers that will read into each other integrated human images. Meanwhile, two cameras project onto the walls the result of this kind of reading. Apart from the countenance – or what is recognisable as such – we see face to face on the computer screens, which upon projections become indistinct, abstract features, not identified with any human or natural aspect. But they are the fruit of the computational, like the “faces”, which result from “mathematics and probabilities”and are a “virtual virtuality, without soul, without history, without memory”[1]. Faces are ante-human or post-computational, phantasmagoric for being incomplete or, above all, they acquire existence through their infinite imagetic flux.

The installation by João Martinho Moura occupies the large lateral chapel of the building of Convento de Santo António, the site chosen for the extension of Espaço/Programa, the Computational Art exhibition prepared by the 2022 edition of the Cerveira Biennial and exhibited in Loulé, in coproduction with Museu Zer0. The curators were Miguel Carvalhais and Luís Pinto Nunes. In the text introducing the catalogue for Vila Nova de Cerveira, they say that they did not adopt a historicist perspective, despite having selected works by artists from different generations: besides the installation by Martinho Moura (b. 1986) and by Mariana Vilanova (b. 1996), Evoking a Simulated Past, 2020, there are Três mapas (quase um atlas), 2018, by Ana Carvalho (b. 1970), Wolfmachine Cerveira, 2020-2022, by André Sier (b. 1977) and Seis 6, 2022, by Pedro Tudela (b. 1962) with Miguel Carvalhais (1974).

After entering the convent, How Computers Imagine Humans is the least visible segment, because it is on the side and is less illuminated; but, for that very reason, it seems to function like an internal organ. The intelligent entrails of the exhibition – which can be understood as an organism, given the set of the five installations in that particular venue, and also because we do not associate the components with the different authors; this emphasises the emergence of each screen, each computer, each speaker or light as a part associated with the others. When we enter, in the main nave of the desecrated temple and beyond the presentation panel, we see a set of screens, illuminated tubes and sonorities, which transform the openings of the old convent into a place filled with the spirit of machines, sounds, light and images. It is not only the products that integrate each installation, but also the mechanisms that make them possible: Evoking a Simulated Past, 2020 (whose title recalls the historical/a-historical thought I mentioned above) is composed of the images, in diptych, of two projectors that are positioned in a dual spot on the wall opposite the screens. They are perched on wooden modules that support them and add enough height for the projected rectangle to be above the floor on the opposite wall. The two projectors are art pieces, the computational art they embody, the reason they work. It is impossible to walk through this exhibition without being part of this proposal by Mariana Vilanova.

As we enter the nave, we see, on the back of the presentation panel, Três Mapas (Quase um Atlas), 2018. Ana Carvalho offers a “mapping”, a cartography of sounds and images, “imprecise fictions”, whose creation used “artificial earthquake-inducing explosives that cause sound vibrations”[2], among other technologies. For Miguel Carvalhais, computational art (quoted in the catalogue by Rosemary Lee), “is found in the aesthetic relationship in computing”. It is different from the instrumental and pragmatic use of computers and algorithms. It is based on the way in which these means become an inseparable part of the body, the aesthetic organism. The same proposal is implied in André Sier’s installation, which is found in the altar region – but equally dispersed in other geographical places where it is still possible to detect the presence of wolves in Portugal. The wolf in the installation’s title (Wolfmachine, that lupine machine) is an absent presence, a statement through the danger of disappearance, of an existence captured by the computational, to which it alerts, in the intermediary spot of its risky coexistence with the human. The altar is the paramount setting for the celebration, the background of the building that immediately captures the visitor’s attention. The latter, despite this call, is warned of the danger of looking directly at the laser emissions: to commune with the sacredness of computational art challenges the human limits; to invade the wilderness space that the wolves signify and that, in this piece, appear as a maquette, can put us at risk.

Space is a Program – Space is distinct from Program. These are two propositions pointed out by the oblique bar of the exhibition’s title, whose shape, in the installation by Pedro Tudela and Miguel Carvalhais, is replicated in six tubular lamps, tilted, and supported by as many metallic structures. Lit, they shine in the middle space of the building’s main nave, and recall the relationship of an almost uncut approximation, an insurmountable separation, between Creator and Creature, between measurable time and eternity; between Man and Machine.

Espaço/Programa is at Convento de Santo António until September 10.

[1] As in the catalogue Description of Espaço/Programa – Arte Computacional, Cerveira Biennial, 2022, p. 85.

[2] Idem, p. 67.