Yese Astarloa, who lives and works between Argentina and Spain, investigates today’s technical-technological landscape. Questioning the logic and mechanics of digital media and devices, as well as their elusive materiality, she tries to glimpse the convergence of virtual and physical realities by bridging the digital/analog divide. Her installations and sculptural objects pursue a “naturalized” dynamic communication, often pushing reflection on the problematics of technology to the point of absurdity. Tracked and coded mouse movements become sculptures, images translate into texts, time collapses and expands, and inert industrial materials seem to draw breath. During a recent residency at Koyne Program in Helsinki, Finland, Astarloa expanded her investigations to explore organic materials such as bacterial cellulose, establishing relationships between living materiality and digital processes.
María Carolina Baulo: The hybrid world that we inhabit—between virtual and physical reality—is a theme very much addressed by your generation, which was born in the midst of a naturalization of both modes of being.
Yese Astarloa: I am interested in thinking about my research and body of work as a practice that investigates the technical landscape we inhabit. I try to make the logic of digital media and its supports— apparently intangible data and information—take shape and thus unfold in physical space and vice versa, to the point where the digital and the material are hybridized in such a way that trying to differentiate them results in an absurdity. . .
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