A generation that moved with the speed of the railroad, the radio waves, the newspapers, the photographs, and which identified politics with the National State, suddenly experienced a terrain bombarded by supersonic aircrafts and by the electronic frequency of the television. The 1973 coup d'etat not only opens the first project of a neoliberal State in the world; it is probably the first televised coup. There is no political economy without media politics. The projective apparatus of history is displaced by the electronic device that opens a new condition of the image and, above all, a new dimension of the apparition of bodies. 

This technological difference is the central issue of the Signometry seminar that Ronald Kay carried out in the Humanistic Studies Department of the University of Chile in 1974. The “body without organs” of Antonin Artaud is understood as a mediated or innervated body. One does not leave language to find the flesh of a pure language, but rather the poetic certainty of electromagnetic waves. “The medial nature, the environment of the reproduction techniques –said Kay–, configures the sense of our perception”. By staging the electronic environment, Artaud Tentative is the first work in Chile to measure the shock of the technological transformation of the political and visual regime. 

The technological mutation of the republican imaginary is brutal; at the same time, however, its effects are slow and endless. How to measure a shock of these dimensions? “The catastrophe of reality recorded in slow motion”: Artaud Tentative is an extended happening that records, in slow motion, the temporal plot of this transformation. Between 1974 and its publication in 2008 at the National Museum of Fine Arts in Santiago, Artaud Tentative remained dormant. In its virtual unfold, the extended happening continued to accumulate different layers condensed in the same building. Each date is in the past of the other, in the future of the other, in a virtual coexistence where there is “no succession but a simultaneous incision inhabited by the transitory version of the facts and the invariable version of its documentation” (Ronald Kay. Del espacio de Acá. 1980). 

Tentativa Artaud (2008). The National Center for Contemporary Art

http://centrodedocumentaciondelasartes.cl/g2/collect/cedoc/images/pdfs/2387.pdf

History of the Heiremans Palace. Museum of Solidarity Salvador Allende

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=fBvVil3E1jI

CNI documents. Military Police of the Pinochet Dictatorship:

https://www.londres38.cl/1934/w3-article-96714.html 

Londres 38. Miguel Lowner

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=T541wDHkh4g

La Sangre de Cronos (2017). BccF:

http://www.bccn.cc/es/event/la-sangre-de-cronos/

V.I.S.U.A.L (1976), printed in the basement of the Department of Humanistic Studies. The National Center for Contemporary Art

http://centrodedocumentaciondelasartes.cl/g2/collect/cedoc/images/pdfs/1477.pdf