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FOrUm OF Maia _ OPorto _ 9 - 30 junE 2006
The What is Watt? artistic event currently shown in Fórum da Maia refers to the three previous editions that took place in the city of Funchal, Madeira.
The first What is Watt? exhibition was held in the Electricity Museum in Funchal, in 2001, and pulled together the works of a heterogeneous group of national and resident artists, that through getting together and having common interests, recognized the importance of the resources offered by electricity for the production of their diverse artistic proposals. Such common interests in the use of electro-technical resources, allowed in the second edition of What is Watt? (2003), not only that new members joined the group, but also to deepen an inter-institutional experience that enabled the group to use simultaneously the facilities of the Electricity Museum, The University of Madeira, and the Contemporary Art Museum in the city of Funchal. The 3rd edition of this event (2005) was shown exclusively in the facilities of the Museum of Contemporary Art, S. Tiago Fortress, in Funchal.
As artists on the 21st century, that cast a retrospective gaze upon the changes produced in reality by industrialization of electric devices, one can easily recognize that since the invention of electricity and throughout the 20th century, it grew on to be the vital energetic flow of social operability.
Electric resources supported by the industrialization of the electric bulb, improved by Edison in 1905, changed the atmosphere of chromatic visibility. The electric bulb overtook the greenish combustion light of gas lighting, providing us with incandescent, irradiant and continuous light. This new projective brightness became a civilizational reference in technical construction and on how we can build the real.
Cinema’s artistic resources were, since it’s very beginning, recognized and considered relevant, and the technical potential and possibilities of metaphorical construction were taken into account. It is interesting to verify that the different stages of technical improvement of cinematographical resources enclosed the modular elements (image, movement, sound and text) now available in computer network and multimedia creations. In this What is Watt? event, the works here assembled, present paths, questions, and problematics connected by their authors, to the different potentialities of technical operability.
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