The Trained Particles Circus – Patxi Araujo (ES)

A hanging metal cage shelters the virtual and physical body of The Trained Particles Circus. An undefined number of particles and their connections, dissected through a Pepper’s ghost in light and shadow, dances alongside an automaton which is composed of articulated rods and servos in an illusory common space. The Trained Particles Circus proposes an improbable, precarious and potentially dangerous meeting place, caged between the real and the virtual. Embodied in the relationship between a synthetic biomechanics and an automaton, it recreates the figure of the circus artist, the puppet with its own life or the fantastic animal; and it places us as spectators to a contemporary spectacle of hybrid and augmented subjects that conjugate light and shadow, fake and magic, virtual and physical reality, machine and organism.

Patxi Araujo (Spain). Artist and researcher. Being his background the fine arts practice, his work takes place in the territory of the poetics of new-media, as an aesthetic alibi to face the technological-digital. His early works were incursions into the territory of interaction and techno-magic. He has also developed spaces, objects and subjects based on the research of the interface concept. Now his investigation focuses on software entities and physical environments, around the concept of the human and nature through bodies, perceptions and metaphors related to programming, artificial life or simulation. His work has been recognized and selected in different biennials, festivals and contests of both video art and electronic experimentation.