Premiere of ‘Global Windshield, The Musical’, a video art work by Momu & No Es that questions our relationship with technocratic culture

Image succeeds image over the video’s three chapters and 19 minute running time, from a cave containing a sea of mercury lava to metadata from the knowledge vaults of the Swiss Fort Knox or a recreation of the universe’s center. In the words of its authors: “Overcoding, serial linkage, looping and general mayhem turn Global Windshield into a digital abstraction wedding poetry and music. A love story that speaks of fears and also hopes at the end of the highway.”

Moreno and Noguera wanted to mark a departure from their previous output and construct a less narrative piece where “we could concentrate more on the images and music, making them the elements of a journey. We want the public to submerge themselves in the video, to feel rather than understand it, and get wrapped up in its images and songs.” But one thing is constant in the video production of this creative team: “Besides being a very direct form of communication, video allows us to reflect on audiovisual culture using the medium itself.” A proposition that runs all the way through this latest venture: “Global Windshield, The Musical explores the impact of a virtual, hyperreal world and invites us to question our relationship with technocratic, digitalized culture in the hybrid space we now inhabit, our tangible lives progressively dematerializing.”

Image ©Pere Pratdesaba

Laura Baigorri, exhibition curator and an associate professor specializing in art and new media in the Fine Arts School at the University of Barcelona, singles out the video’s succession of “eclectic musical episodes,” which, she says, make for “a fresh, playful, involving work whose synthetic sounds and images seek to immerse the spectator in the Internet universe, as if they were exploring it hypnotically through the screen. One of the strengths of this exhibit is that it encourages immersive viewing.”

An interdisciplinary partnership

Lucía Moreno (Basel, 1982) and Eva Noguera (Barcelona, 1979) began working together in 2004 on the project Historias de Olivia, commissioned by Antonio Ortega for a workshop at the Centre d’Art Santa Mònica. Among the highlights of their almost 15 years of uninterrupted collaboration – they do not produce works separately – are 1979-1982 Las Guerras Élficas; a screening performance in De Player (Rotterdam) under the title I’m sick of thinking that my dead friends have gone to the Canary Islands; and the film Life of our Progressive Thinkers, in which they travel through Arizona and Utah with the meteorite hunter Robert Haag.

Global Windshield, The Musical, the artists point out, “is the result of two years spent on aesthetic analysis and exploring issues relating to the impact of new technologies. On the one hand, it rounds off a particular thesis; on the other, it opens the door to new projects.” Receiving a Multiverse Grant has enabled them “to complete the work under exceptional conditions as regards both time and funding. Being able to produce the video in the right working conditions and with the help of the most qualified professionals meant we could give it the detailed attention that a good job demands.” Hence the 3D editing was done at studios in Madrid and London, the texts written by Momu & No Es were turned into song lyrics in collaboration with the musician JaRu (Javier Ruiz). and the musical direction of the performances and recordings was entrusted to Colombian singer-songwriter Natalia Sorzano (Nika).

Global Windshield is the eighth instalment in the MULTIVERSE exhibition series in progress since May last year, giving the public a first opportunity to view the work produced by recipients of the 2015 Multiverse Grants for Video Art Creation. It is also the first musical in a series that has embraced such diverse genres as documentary film, conceptual essay, fiction and digital abstraction, with themes that evidence the authors’ ability to provoke critical thinking. To date, the videos occupying the Foundation’s MULTIVERSO space have featured current news items set against hand-crafted objects (Marc Larré, Sincronías 2016), a generational snapshot of the alienating dynamics of consumerism (Carles Congost, The Wolf Motives / Los motivos del lobo), Spain’s recent past as observed through its public works projects (Txuspo Poyo, Expediente: Túnel de la Engaña) and its monuments (Isaías Griñolo, La España profunda (de Ortega y Gasset a Rocío Jurado), the history and conquest of indigenous lands (Rosana Antolí, Piri Reis. La continuación de un mito), new models of the family and motherhood (María Ruido, Mater Amatísima) and an investigation into an episode in art market history (Pedro Luis Cembranos, El accidente de Vollard). This list is now joined by the interrogation of our relationship with technocratic culture proposed by Momu & No Es in Global Windshield and will continue with a meditation on life through landscape (Lúa Coderch, [Shelter]), which will round off the current cycle.