Daniel Canogar

Daniel Canogar - Scrawl

Técnica: Generative animation, screen, computer.

Biografía del Artista: Daniel Canogar is a Spanish contemporary artist born in Madrid in 1964. He is known for his work at the intersection of art, technology and science, exploring the relationship between humans and technology through multimedia installations. Canogar graduated in Fine Arts from the Complutense University of Madrid in 1985, and in 1989 he moved to New York to continue his studies at the Pratt Institute, where he specialized in photography and video. In the 1990s he began working in multimedia installations, using video projections and screens to create works that engaged the viewer in an interactive dialogue. Throughout his career, Canogar has exhibited his work in galleries and museums around the world, including the Museo Nacional Centro de Arte Reina Sofía in Madrid, the Museum of Contemporary Art in Seville, and the Denver Museum of Contemporary Art in the United States. He has also worked on several public projects, such as the permanent installation "Wave" at Charlotte-Douglas International Airport in North Carolina. One of Canogar's best-known works is "Assault", a 2005 installation consisting of a giant LED screen suspended in the air, displaying a series of moving images taken from action movie scenes. The work was exhibited at the group exhibition "Infinite Painting" at the Museum of Contemporary Art in Sofia in 2012. In addition to his work in the visual arts, Canogar has also been a professor at the European University of Madrid and has collaborated with several technology companies on research and development projects. In 2014, he was awarded Spain's National Electronic Art Award for his contribution to the discipline of digital art.

Digital artwork. Variable dimensions. Screen not included. Daniel Canogar presents his new work, Scrawl, at ARCO 2023. In recent years, social media has radically changed the way we communicate. What was initially perceived as a democratization of hegemonic media narratives – controlled by a minority – are now seen as the main drivers of post-truth. Twitter is a particularly radical platform in terms of its content, with less strict censorship policies and, therefore, rawer content. This condition makes it a perfect breeding ground for channeling frustrations, contemporary concerns and radical conspiracies, a dissonant collective voice that sometimes operates in the form of a wave where a text of less than 280 characters can reach viral and global diffusion. Scrawl is a generative digital piece that reacts to Twitter trends in real time. The software of the piece periodically collects the most mentioned topics in the Twitter community. These issues are translated in real time into an aesthetic of vandalism and denunciation that, unlike professional graffiti, are made with Scrawl is a work of art that is constantly changing, and it attempts to capture the multiple forces and tensions that cohabit in social spaces like Twitter, where the identity of individuals – always escorted by the screen – is displayed. in its rawest and, paradoxically, perhaps most real and honest version. The rhythm of Scrawl imitates the succession of layers applied to an urban wall, where graffiti texts are periodically covered by flat layers of paint, creating in turn a new canvas for a new succession of graffiti. A pulse is generated between the desire for communication individual of the citizen, and the institutional cleanup that erases and “cleans” the chaotic graffiti world. The result is an algorithmic work with an automatic poetics that constantly slides between the aesthetics of social protest and abstract painting.