Macu Moran prologue for Angel Roman's Book "Art as a screen: Individual conflicts in global times"
Román, fascinated by the constant influences that the drastic technologic advancements constantly produce in the behavior of human beings nowadays, analyzes the juncture of information, particular but massive, shared in real time among a myriad range of places of the planet, as diverse as distant, which all converge in the vertiginous process of today's global development.
This undeniably altermodernist present has consequences that can only be imagined, and undoubtedly refers to the approach projected by Paul Virilio:
"The speed of light does not merely transform the world, it becomes the world. Globalization is the speed of light. "
Ctheory, Paul Virilio in conversation with John Armitage, 2000
Art as a screen (Individual conflicts in global times) investigates social facets of key importance in the economic, political and social spheres, absorbed in a sucking dynamic exponentially accelerated by the speed and scope of contemporary digital communication.
The author considers, in turn, the search for the contemporary individual, obliged to remain alert and daily updated with the new possibilities that technology allows, towards a context that procures his particular filiation within the global framework to which he irrefutably belongs.
This series of essays promulgate the potential of art as a thought means and as active ingredient of evolution, capable of projecting proposals of parallel and alternative realities, capturing, altering and modeling the paradigms of the systemic structure of inherited social mechanics in which we are currently immersed.
Attending to the commitment that contemporary artists maintain with issues of irrevocable social scope, such as feminism, the vulnerability of the body, sexual freedom and the intrinsic transforming power of our own image, this is undoubtedly a singular reading about humanistic production in times of high technological impact.
This book is highly recommended for those of us interested in understanding more broadly and deeply the historic moment which we participate in.
