In the many ways that artists interpret their role with science, from becoming the ‘god’ of an ecosystem to decoding invisible signals and symbols of various living entities, Mauricio Lacrampette embraces instead the role of the serious scientist using technologies to expose what we can’t normally see with our own limited perceptual possibilities. He challenges complex natural systems unveiling them in all their significance and context. This is the case for KMNCHK ObsLam, where his speculative technology has reached a fully evolved stage. The work consists of a stationary, autonomous and interactive apparatus placed in Alto Patache at the Atacama UC Station, a unique place in the Chilean Atacama desert, known for fog harvesting and, more generally, for distinct ecological research. The project stems from the initial KMNCHK ScanLab project, which aimed to obtain unique photographs of the local kamanchaka fog, before evolving to this final version which is an observatory visualising the fog’s chaotic movement patterns through a 5000-meter-high vertical plane of light, slicing a dynamic section through the atmosphere. The ‘spectral’ fog presence is then revealed in its ‘sublime’ encounter with the coastal desert night. Lacrampette combines the scientific needs of acquiring data scanning and monitoring a place, with the characteristic of an autonomous artwork in an environmentally hostile location. The double perspective (scientific and aesthetic) can be simultaneously applied to the work, so the fog’s chaotic movement patterns become both scientific imaging, through a real-time scanning system, and generative art, attracting our senses. The double sense of ‘observing’ (the artist remarks) is an act of revelation and knowledge, changing the ‘ontology of the desert’. What remains then is the artist as an agent in the world, intervening in systems to produce new knowledge, just like proper researchers do.

 

Mauricio Lacrampette – KMNCHK ObsLam