Summary: Javier Chozas is an artist who investigates the relation between digital identity or identities and personal identity, how we change our image on networks and how this affects us. In The flight of the glow worms, the artist reflects on the saturation caused by the access to and excess of information on social networks and the internet. He sees us as glow worms lit up by the immediacy, volume of information and lack of privacy afforded by this media.
Keywords: social networks, digital identity, personal identity, installation, lights and shadows.
Javier Chozas
Madrid, 1972. He lives and works in Vienna, Austria.
His research explores personal and digital identity, how we change our image on networks and how we build a public identity that is, at times, very different from our personal identity. Without adopting a particular position, he shows us our digital behaviour and rethinks it. Through installations, sculpture, playing with light and shadow, and experimentation with new media, he creates conceptual works of art which analyse how we relate with the World Wide Web and how we create an identity, or a number of identities.
He holds a Degree in Architecture from the Higher Technical School of Architecture (ETSAM), Madrid (2009) and a Master’s Degree in Art and Creation from the Complutense University of Madrid (2013), of which he is currently an honorary lecturer. Thanks to a grant awarded by the British Hispano Foundation (2014), he has carried out doctoral studies at the Ruskin School, Oxford University. He is currently undertaking a Master’s Degree in Media Art Cultures at Donau-Universität Krems Austria (2015).
He has exhibited his work in Madrid at the ASM28 Gallery, at the Blanca Berlin Gallery (2012), at Medialab Prado (2011) and La Zúa Gallery (2010). He has also had the opportunity to exhibit in Berlin at the Kunsthaus Bethanien, (2011) and the Art Claims Impulse Gallery (2010), and, in China, at the Don Gallery, Shanghai (2010) and the Arcaute Gallery, Beijing (2009), among others.
He has completed artist residencies at Casa de Velázquez (2013) and El Ranchito (2011), in Madrid.
La fuite des lucioles [The flight of the glow worms], 2014-2015
A project developed within the ETAC framework of artistic residencies, firstly at La Panacée Centre of Contemporary Culture, Montpellier, France, and then at Bòlit Centre of Contemporary Art, Girona.
In this work, the artist reflected on the conjunction of impact and digital identity, understood to be everything connected to one’s own reflection. The mark left by his essay Digital Time. Narcissus, Narcotised can be seen, where he explores narcissistic ego in contemporary societies and the digital era. According to the artist, the more room we give to our digital identity, the greater the bombardment of images that, at one and the same time, both seduce and saturate us. Thus, individuals become creatures that fly like glow worms, hypnotised around light.
He has carried out a part of the project in every centre where he has been resident. A first stage saw him observing how we stop and face disappointment as a result of our digital experiences. This disappointment produces an emotional impact, becoming a physical, real plane. The works thus explore openings, those that are produced when we move, whether they are physical, affective or emotional. In the second part of the project, the individual is no longer opaque and needs to fill the emptiness with the glow of screens, an illusion that turns out to be as flawed as the reflection we see in the black screens of computers. The project essays a number of camouflage tactics to hide the disappointments of the shadowy areas of the hyper-illuminated technological world.
Javier Chozas
