Crédulos (Credulous), 2002
Ampudia, Eugenio
Videoinstallation

One can establish an interactive relationship with a work, but none can be more meaningful than that which emerges from self-awareness, that which signifies an actual change in self-perception. This is why the installation Crédulos allows the possibility of interactivity reaching its most profound level. The visitor enters the space (only perhaps a true place), equipped with furniture and computer terminals, that apparently serves as an area to relax and connect to the Internet. Projected from above, giant amoebas cross the floor, flowing among and interacting with the users. An overhead camera simultaneously records and projects images of the room. Seeing the images shown in real time, the visitor not only discovers that the furniture spells out the word “crédulos” (credulous) but also sees him or herself immersed in a different scale of existence. Reduced to the microscopic level of amoebas and yet present at the same time in his or her own scale, as well as that of the telematic data networks.

This disorientation of perception is a first step in discovering that the microscopic level, human scale, and the global telematic dimension share the same organizational pattern: networks. The fabric of life thus appears as a multidimensional structure of living systems that are hosted inside each other successively. Organisms, populations, and ecosystems, level by level, form a collective of network system, a network of networks. The visitor, upon noticing his or her inclusion in this tapestry of networks contained within networks, will become aware of his or her locus. A relative, fluid, eminently relational locus, given that it exists at all the levels, from the macro to the micro. This new perspective modifies ones perception of the level of the social stratum where one lives. The experience of Crédulos is thus perfectly incorporated into the dynamics of social autopoiesis.

The registering of any level of existence in a single continuum, under a sole organizational pattern, upsets, displaces, and attacks the mechanistic Newtonian/Cartesian notions and legacy that, with their impermeable categories, may have explained life up to now. However, Crédulos, with its meta-perspective proposal, offers an expanded opportunity to locate oneself in and move among levels, even at the expense of the mental destabilization caused by replacing inherited analytical structures . Recognizing this global, relational and fluid organizational coherence of which we are simply nodes at one level among many shows how credulous we are to think that life can be seen from a sole compartmentalized, closed and defined perspective.