Nicolas Malevé and Jara Rocha, 'High Latencies', 2024. Photo: Juande Jarillo
Activity
From October 17, 2024 until April 21, 2025
High Latencies
Studies of the presence with Jara Rocha and Nicolás Malevé. [contra]panorama
In the transdisciplinary project High Latencies, by visual artist and programmer Nicolás Malevé and activist and researcher Jara Rocha, the museum’s infrastructures and socio-technical dependences operate as a case study. For this purpose, the pair have established their own temporary department in the museum: the Department of Presence Studies. In this space, and in constant conversation with different teams at MACBA, they propose three areas of interest for thinking with and from digital logistical operations.
There are many ways of being present in this museum. As a visitor, as a worker, as an artist, as a piece, as bacteria, as a procedure, as memory. There are also many ways of being absent. Each of these forms of presence carries with it stories of appreciation, experimentation, repetition, subjugation, learning, care, exclusion, erasure, resistance and damage. With this project, we are looking at how the forms of presence are affected and activated through software systems in this institutional situation.
In early 2024, we – Nicolas Malevé and Jara Rocha – put ourselves forward to form a temporary department in the museum: the Department of Presence Studies. From there, we have activated three areas of inquiry to analyse and review some of the museum’s infrastructures and technical dependences. They are as follows: the recent update to the museum’s CRM (Customer Relationship Management), the virtual tour on the website with a 3D view of some exhibitions, and the set of devices used to monitor the air. These are three areas that will help us to understand and discuss how the museum’s different manufacturing, maintenance and reproduction frameworks produce forms of presence or absence and, therefore, carry latencies.
In communication infrastructures, latency refers to the delay caused by the time the structure needs to process information. The industrial standard is organised in such a way that the lowest possible latency is always sought (i.e., the fastest transmission, the shortest delay). We are investigating high latencies (in an unhurried, non-linear way), in a prefigurative attempt to study presence in ways that shun technical efficiency, optimisation or solution.
On a practical level, High Latencies organises a series of conversations with members of the museum team, as well as public encounters with special guests. The discussion threads will interweave in a series of diagrams that will be published and updated erratically on the project website (altas-latencias.xyz) and on print-outs that will be displayed in the exhibition space. The diagrams do not offer a complete or definitive view of the conversations; instead, they encourage the creation of speculative associations and (slow, unfinished) understanding of the dense network of relationships and dependences produced by the complex phenomenon of presence.
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Audios
4 results
participants
Nerea Calvillo 
Fernando Domínguez Rubio 
Jose Iglesias García-Arenal 
Ren Loren Britton 
Nicolas Malevé 
Jara Rocha 
Laura Vallés Vílchez ![[contra]panorama](https://img.macba.cat/wp-content/uploads/2024/02/contrapanorama_iweb.jpg)
In 2021, MACBA launched the triennial Panorama, which aimed to “deepen its collaboration and dialogue with local artists and cultural agents”. [contra]panorama, the second edition of Panorama retains the same aim but works towards it through a year-long series of interventions that take the project’s title literally, in order to question both the continuing relevance of the triennial (or biennial) format and its capacity to offer a panoramic image of the present.
From October 24, 2024 to April 21, 2025