Sin nombre y sin memoria (No Name and No Memory)
Installation
In Southeast Asia and other places on the earth, there are communities of fireflies that emit pulsar light in unison. Small but great flashes of synchronised light.
It was discovered, upon observation, that these tiny, insignificant insects, were able to use the emission and uptake of infrareds to synchronise their rhythms in order to emit together and thus cooperate in attracting females from further afield.
Hence, Luci, a small sculpture or little “machine”, made from five light and sound emitters with a mechanism fitted to simulate the behaviour of a colony of fireflies. Designed in 1994, it prompted José Manuel Berenguer to create the current installation “Sin nombre y sin memoria” (No name, no memory).
During the day, or in the presence of another light source independent from the community, such as a light bulb, the members of the Luci community act on an individual and unorganised basis. However, if the external interference disappears, the lucis gradually organise themselves and pulsate in synchrony. In the process from total chaos to order, Luci goes through all kinds of pre-synchronisation; moments verging on rhythm, beautiful percussive improvisation seen as pulsations of light and heard through its small speakers. Luci thereupon becomes virtual music, virtual language, and virtually animal until eventually a mortal, dull and irritating order appears. It is an eternal dream of sorts, which, as in stories, only a kiss can end.
The Luci phenomenon in “Sin nombre y sin memoria” has been designed to be shown by projectors and to operate in space in response to visitors’ behaviour. According to José Manuel Berenguer,
“Sin nombre y sin memoria deals with neither truths nor untruths. It does not even refer to them. It is an attempt to build realities and either material or immaterial things that do not exist. It does not matter whether they are understood, as I am the first not to understand them. They are not there to be understood. They are only there to be. These things are extraordinarily rudimentary beings with comparatively primitive, emergent, predictable or unpredictable behaviours. They are based on feedback mechanisms that are applied to their visual and sound appearances and constitute the functional basis for their tiny capacity for recall. In all of them I programmed algorithms that at times are implemented internally to regulate their behaviour and at others prompts behaviour by using possible external information that provides them with the sounds and the positions of visitors. It is not always easy to appreciate whether their behaviour is internally or externally determined, whether they are arbitrarily free or whether they are conditioned to some extent by something different from them. They are not always comprehensible. They are never totally understood although it is even harder to understand whether oneself is understood. How do you know if what before you understands you? Is its behaviour a symptom of the fact you belong to its fantasies? Does it have fantasies? How do you know whether what is before you (which you do not know whether it understands you or not), is or is not a being? You can only believe what it is or what it is not, and whether it understands you or not. Everything depends on what you expect a being to be, whatever it is.”