The Unbridled Eye

a Curatorial Text by Gonzalo Aguirre

Long time ago we stopped looking. And not so long ago we delegated the eye on not sensory perception machines. More recently we have even become prostheses of those machines that use us to circulate their perceptions, through the sensory device that we have abandoned but that still runs even without us taking note of it. So we were, eager for technical replacements of our old sensory perceptions, for digital images to replace our old tactile eye, when suddenly someone peered into the heart of the machines of perception that replace us, a world curiously extrasensory, or as its discoverer would name it, ultrasensory. Indeed, Federico Winer is a kind of contemporary discoverer, a sailor who has managed to see the Magellan Strait link between the sensory ocean and the digital ocean.

Google Earth manifests an extreme distance of looking, which it offers as general technical model of looking. At the core of this model, the Argentine photographer has discovered a gap that guides distance to its own source of interiority and technicity: ultradistance.

This is so much so, that if one would want to name the trade through which the artist communicates the discovery of that path or pathos one should say that Winer is more a painter than a photographer. Keeping the analogy we might say that the mouse is his brush, but we would be mistaken. His brush is his eye.

Painting was always a matter of a tactile and slow eye. Photography was always a matter of a tactile and instantaneous eye. Maybe Winer has discover the linking path who joins that instantaneity with it’s old source of slowness: ultravelocity.

To appreciate the discovery of Winer it is useful to know about the techno-digital continent as in the same way to understand Magellan discovery knowing about the american continent was needed. This geographic parallel is not accidental and, moving forward, it would be postulated that Winer creates a new way of doing geography, a kind of Aesthetic Geography that, assuming all it’s transfiguration power of the usual world political map, turns out to be ultrapolitical.

Hence it is not surprising the origin of our artist. The Río de la Plata has historically been a kind of ultra-area. Since its description as "river without banks", and reaching the image of "ocean without shores" applied to the Pampa, some outrageous tradition shelters Winer and drives him to regain the gesture of many migrants who came to the South of our continent from overseas land.

The Sky That Gazes Upon Us: Federico Winer’s Ultradistancia

a Curatorial Text by Hernán Ulm

Perhaps there is no right distance from which to see what is happening to us amid the relentless vertigo of the moments that fall upon us from above. Every instant, satellites produce images in their sustained drift along the imaginary orbits of the Earth. Perhaps taking a position is impossible in a space saturated with images that overlap, fade, and are continuously forgotten.

Perhaps the only way we might finally see — the only way to shape a situated gaze, the only way to inhabit a point of view within the very field of images — is to break apart the excessive forms of what is seen and build a distance that can no longer be measured by the coordinates of an eye. To make one’s own gaze a vertical instance that falls, itself, upon space and time. No longer merely a distance, but an ultradistancia (as one might say, an ultrahuman distance) — only possible for an ultra-human experience.

An ultradistance that situates itself within technological media, extracting from the algorithmic eye a vision that no program could ever calculate. Like a celestial nomad, Federico Winer, from a quiet apartment in Buenos Aires, roams across the surface of satellite images to find within them what escapes normal vision — to wrest from the satellites’ calculations an image that no algorithm could compute.

Art, after all, as Gilles Deleuze once said, consists in producing visions and sounds that cannot be perceived by ordinary means of perception. Ultradistance does not work through algorithms; these are merely the technical materiality of a computational space. It is from within them that Winer extracts what they cannot produce. Ultradistancia is the artistic materiality that detaches itself from calculation and predictability — a displacement within programmable media that generates an uncertain vision, an uncertainty (for the horror of programs lies precisely in the uncertain).

Seen from above — from a vertical perspective that literally falls from the sky, or more precisely, from beyond the heavens as a force exceeding the limits of the planetary — the surface of the Earth appears with extraordinary forms. Where we might see only a familiar figure, the satellite gaze, intervened by the artist, revives atavistic landscapes, legendary animals, prehistoric shapes, composing a territory that unsettles our sense of certainty.

A cartography that does not seek to organize things, but rather to play at the threshold where the visible arranges itself into figures. Yet it is also an affective map, questioning the geographies through which politics has divided the territory. A cartography that reveals a distance unbridgeable by human sight — a distance no longer belonging to the space where human life dwells. A gaze stripped of every claim to technical precision.

Through a process of meticulous subtraction, the series of “Black Images” reduces the visible to a minimum of light. This subtraction — involving an almost surgical manipulation of pixels — exposes the artificial nature of all vision, isolating figures that appear outside any context, as if suddenly floating in the night that dreams them. As we have said before, something of the technical world’s dreamlike nightmares surfaces in Winer’s works: a diurnal remnant of the night, a pulse of darkness in the midst of daylight.

Or, on the contrary, the force of light intensifies through the presence of a kind of white ocean that seems to overflow the limits of the image — a battle between colors and their sum (white as the sum that cancels difference), a tension that subjects the images to the expression of their contradictions. What we see is always the result of a conflict. The satellite itself must struggle against its own gaze to reveal the images we look at. The satellite, too, sees light as an ally it is forever ready to betray — for to see too much, as we know, is a way of seeing nothing at all. And art stretches that limit, where excess of light becomes blindness.

Finally, there are those images in which the triumph of color overcomes the impulses of both night and light. There, a joyful explosion enacts the celebration of a hallucinatory vision. Layers of color cut across one another, forming an uncertain density that defies the reality of the image. For if Federico Winer’s work exposes the nightmarish underside of the dreamlike world of satellite technology, it also shows the delirious limit where the illusion of finding a place untouched by humanity always teeters. The strangeness of these landscapes lies in this: they seem uninhabited by anyone.

A hallucination that prevents the satellite from recognizing (or forces it to struggle again to recognize) the very place it depicts. Ultradistancia, in this sense, is also a destitution of place — an undoing of the sites from which the images have been torn. The persistence of naming these sites in the titles of the photographs might be Winer’s subtle joke: to remind us that we do not see what we are told we see, that what is shown does not match its name, and that every politics of vision inscribes itself in the tension between name and place.

Or perhaps more radically, that places themselves are nothing but an excess of names — names which, with a small turn of the program, cease to exist within the artistic ultradistance of satellite photography.

An ultradistancia, then, that does not belong to the way distance exists for humans, but to the most sophisticated technologies of the digital world — revealing, ultimately, the artificial nature of the Earth itself. It reveals that what we see could, always, be seen otherwise.