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Provocar uma falha no aparelho: arte e contraideologia / Inducing a failure in the apparatus: art and counter-ideology

Marina Bortoluz PolidoroAugusto Neftali Corte de Oliveira

This paper discusses media art in which the interrupted functioning of devices and systems serve as metaphors. It focuses on short-circuits between the apparatus as a machine, as a system and the apparatus as an ideology. In this analysis, we approach the concepts of apparatus and ideology, failure, and counter-ideology in three on-line artworks exhibited on Verter Platform during the years 2020 and 2021: Ok/Cancel, by Elias Maroso; Inundação, by Fran Favero; Padrões Anômalos, by Cesar Baio. With Vilém Flusser's concept of apparatus in mind, we propose that there is a counter-ideological and counter-hegemonic dimension in valuing the inoperative and interrupted in a society that increasingly imposes a logic of efficiency, productivity and consumption. In an ideal functioning, the apparatus (the media, the system) must be as transparent as possible, transmitting in such a way as to allow the subject to concentrate on the information (as when we look at a photo and believe in it as if we were seeing the thing/event itself). If something interrupts this flow, such as noise, technical failure or accident), the subject's attention turns to the medium, the system itself.