BARCELONA.- The Museu d’Art Contemporani de Barcelona presents, with the support of Acción Cultural Española (AC/E), the exhibition megafone.net/2004-2014, an audiovisual installation especially conceived for MACBA, documenting a decade of activity of the project megafone.net created by Antoni Abad (Lleida, 1956). Since 2004, megafone.net has been inviting groups on the margins of society to express their experience and opinions. Using mobile phones, these collectives record their own sound, video, text and photographic messages, which are then published instantly on the web. The participants transform these devices into digital megaphones capable of amplifying their individual and collective voices, often ignored or misrepresented by the mass media. In constant evolution, the project is a clear predecessor of the social networks.
The project megafone.net, created in 2004 by Antoni Abad, pioneers the exploration of other possible social and communicative uses for mobile phone technologies, which were in wide use at the end of the last century. Abad, who has centred his artistic activity on the digital media, brings under the title of megafone.net various collaborative works of mobile phone publication on the web, some of which are still relevant today.
With megafone.net Abad invites socially excluded groups to have face-to-face meetings in order to define a common message with the help of mobile phones; create videos, photographs and sound recordings of their everyday life and upload them online for their immediate publication on the internet. Thus the web becomes a digital megafone that amplifies the testimony of these groups and communities, often ignored or misrepresented by the mass media, as well as stigmatised by stereotypes.
During its first ten years of activity, megafone.net has explored urban contexts as diverse as Mexico City, Lleida, Geneva, São Paulo, Tindouf (Algeria), Montreal and Manizales (Colombia). At the same time, it has served groups such as young gypsies (León), sex workers (Madrid), Nicaraguan immigrants (San José, Costa Rica), people with functional diversity (Barcelona, Geneva and Montreal) and Latino and Asian immigrants (New York), among others. Participants in some of these projects have remained active through their mobile phone transmissions. For example, BARCELONA*accessible – with people with diverse functional impairment – was launched in Barcelona in 2006 and still continues to generate activity.
The exhibition at MACBA reunites for the first time the extensive documentation on this decade of activity of megafone.net, presenting it as an interactive audiovisual installation specifically designed by Antoni Abad for the Museum spaces and documenting the thirteen proposals developed so far. The materials compiled include random projections of audiovisual publications uploaded online by participants; touch kiosks for online consultation of the web of each project; photographs of the people and groups involved; and three documentaries, made by Glòria Martí, compiling the testimonies generated during the development of each project.
The museographic presentation particularly explores the transfers between users and the artist, as catalyst. In this way, these experiences go beyond institutional boundaries, transforming the museum into a receptacle for these works, processes and exchanges and, at the same time, connecting it not only with the physical spaces of the city and its geographies, but also with the virtual space, with the perhaps invisible territory – although tangible and above all useful – of the Web.
Between the late eighties and early nineties, Antoni Abad (Lleida, 1956) focused on the development of mobile sculptures that, accompanied by photographic sequences, already inquired into the possibilities of the expanded and moving image. After a period as artist-in-residence at The Banff Centre for the Arts (Alberta, Canada, 2003-2004), he began working with the videographic medium, without renouncing to the spatial and architectural concerns of his earlier work, as we can see in the piece Últimos deseos (Latest Wishes), 1995, which was presented in 1999 at the Venice Biennale curated by Harald Szeemann. In 1996, following an invitation from Roc Parés for the platform ‘MACBA online’, a project initiated by the Universitat Pompeu Fabra and MACBA, Abad made Sisyphus, a video installation that reinterprets the classic myth and that also unfolds into a new version for the web: his first foray into the Internet. In 1997 he made a further video installation, Natural Sciences, which investigated users’ reactions of empathy and repulsion.
Since then Antoni Abad has focused on digital media, making proposals as emblematic as Z (2001–3), a work that anticipates the use of social networks, where users interact with each other by downloading to their computers a virtual fly allowing for collective and simultaneous interaction. The Z project was presented at MACBA in 2002 and received the Ciutat de Barcelona 2003 award in the Multimedia category.
In 2006, BARCELONA*accessible received the National Visual Arts Prize of the Generalitat de Catalunya and the Golden Nica Award in the Digital Communities category at the Arts Electronica festival in Linz, Austria.
