Danielcanogar

The interface of optics, electronics, and the body has been at the root of Daniel Canogar’s art for more than twenty years. Trained in visual communications in Madrid, he later studied photography at New York’s International Center for Photography. His approach is multi-disciplinary and focuses on how technology affects our ways of understanding the world and our perception of ourselves.
Canogar’s most important photographic aim was to question the mode of photographic representation as traditionally represented by a two-dimensional image hung on a wall or seen in a magazine. From the very beginning he has concerned himself with installation art that incorporates the spectator as an active player in art pieces that change as he or she move through them. He writes, “I have always looked for ways to alter traditional photographic formats. Through photo-installations I have tried to eliminate the photographic frame, submerging the spectator in the image. These installations investigate how identity is altered by the space of the spectacle.”

Insertion of a viewer, whether a human being or an electro-optical device, into that space is vital to understanding his installations. With the advent of fiber optics cables in the nineteen-nineties, he began, metaphorically, to explore the body and its mediated representation. In Cara (Face, 1993), Canogar starts off with modern creation myths of the doctor-scientist-artist. The work is an installation with three projectors and various fiber-optics cables he uses to display a minimalized self-portrait. “The cables that traverse this self-portrait,” he explains,” have both a practical function (they carry the electrical current for the lamps) and an aesthetic one. Reflections on the construction of identity, corporeal electricity, and the myth of Dr. Frankenstein informed the making of this piece.” As with the fictional Dr Frankenstein, the discovery of the body as, essentially, an electrical system with its own internal networks of nerves controlled by a computer, the brain, led him into brave new worlds.
Various projects during the nineties and early 2000s, such as Horror Vacui (1999), Digital Hide 2 (2002), and Otras Geologias (Other Geologies, 2005) were his explorations into this new terrain. Thus, “Digital technology and how it has changed the perception of reality is another theme central to my artistic exploration. The overabundance of visual information, the electronic baroque, and the difficulty that humans have in processing these excesses are concepts present. . . . In all of these, the virus-like image multiplies itself and invades the space of representation.”

Otras Geologias is particularly important because it marks a turning point for his later work. He compiled an extensive series of images from the eastern part of Madrid at a time of explosive growth. The rubble of construction merged with the rubble of construction. To him, “the neighborhood looked like a war zone.” He also became interested in the accumulation of electronic scrap, the waste of old technologies: the dead computers, disk drives, monitors, and, above all, the network cables. Otras Geologias is a reflection on visual excess and the difficulties that this iconic inflation has for the artist, “a problem that Pop artists had to deal with as well,” he adds. “From the outset it was clear to me that the representation of excess had to be formally excessive. Garbage, in the end, became an excuse for me to try and answer a visual question that especially concerns me: how do we symbolize a reality that is constantly bombarding us with information? Mass-communication technologies submit us to a daily rapid-fire of images that we can hardly assimilate. I am certain that a society that is unable to process its surroundings becomes psychotic. Art then has a therapeutic function.”
As Otras Geologias developed, Canogar was entranced by the possibilities of fiber optics as representing our increasingly interconnected world and as a symbol for our own neural networks. He writes that “the fiber-optics cables that I use in my installations are also used for endoscopic explorations inside the body, and their presence in my work has greatly determined the nature of the images that I am showing. . . . The bodies either offer themselves or protect themselves from the gaze.” The works that followed, beginning with Ingrávidos (Weightlessness, 2003), Enredos (Tangles, 2008), and Arañas I and II (Spiders, 2008), combined fiber optics and projections in three-dimensional installations. When the viewers move through these “tangles” and “webs” Canogar has created, they interrupts the images projected through the cables. The effect is uncanny. Canogar’s installations provide an active space where “Instead of being passive spectators, the viewers activate the installation by covering and uncovering images while walking through the exhibition. The spectators not only become a moving screen but also discover their shadow when their bodies interrupt the projections.”

With works like Enredos (2008) and Arañas I and II (2008), Canogar succeeds in braking out of the traditional frame of photographic representation. He embeds new media and new technologies in his work in order to demonstrate that “in the present, we witness a new rewriting of the body under the paradigm of the digital. What does it mean to have a body in the electronic era, an era that makes us feel that to have flesh is obsolete? . . . To stop the digital flow allows me to study the electronic body in detail, to investigate its contradictions, its desires, and its limits. In capturing basic gestures such as lifting an arm, rubbing hands, or closing eyes, I not only discover the new borders of a virtual body, but I also recover the inherent mystery of the miracle of having an organism.” Canogar confronts us with the Brave New World of modern technology and the way we interface with it. Where we go from here, in which directions, to which future is anybody’s guess.