Protomembrana, 2006
Antúnez, Marcel.lí
Lecture/Interactive action and video screening

Protomembrana is presented as a theoretical and practical lesson on systemwriting; that is, on "playwriting" for computer systems. Using words, music, and graphic animation as a multimedia whole controlled via interfaces, Marcel.lí Antúnez has structured this action as a performance and an interactive lecture. Along with the artist’s verbal narration, computers, projections and images of the audience taken by a pistol camera combine to weave a narration that is continuously being created. More than a metaphor, the complex nature of Protomembrana is best understood as an epitome, as a direct, effective demonstration of the emerging horizontal narrations made possible by new forms of digital communication.

A rational basis for understanding the world was methodical, linear, progressive and geometrical, its literacy comprised of coordinates, the abscissa and the ordinate, and rigorous order. That cognitive foundation has been substantially modified, first by visual culture and then by digital culture. The technologies of language, with their temporalization and sequencing, were shaken up some time ago by the audiovisual culture emerging at that time with its dynamic, synthetic form of cognition. However, the digitalization and interactivity of the new participatory online media have reinforced this linguistic transformation dynamic by contributing collaboration, interactivity, decontextualization and recombination, all present in the ongoing conversation taking place on the world wide web. Protomembrana , as a collaborative, multimedia narration, presents and exemplifies a new form of generating and processing narrative. This is narrative 2.0 or higher. A paradigm shift like the one that took place in science in the shift from linear to non-linear systems.

With a view to cybernetics and the problem of communication between machines and bodies, as well as connective thought, Protomembrana influences the plots of narratives in the network society. A web of non-linear linguistic structures with feedback loops able to self-organize their own communication flow based on audiovisual media. A textuality that has gone beyond the digital to become autopoietic. A new way of narrating, knowing, and therefore, of thinking. That’s what is actually at stake in the transition from the psychodynamics of today’s digital culture.