Projects

Colombiritmos, (Manizales, Colombia, ISEA2017), 2017- Reza Safavi and Max Kazemzadeh

"Colombiritmos" (“Colombi”: Colombia “ritmos”: Algorithms) is an interactive, digital, kinetic, geo-location performance project that uses an algorithmic functions to direct the field-user to navigation of the city of Manizales, and to interact with its people and products, which is presently the main center for the production of Colombian coffee. Influenced by the Situationists who, before the time of computer code, experimented with numerous rules for navigating Paris with the intention of breaking from routine to re-experience Paris from new perspectives, the navigation in "Colombiritmos" took place within a commuter gondola in the city center which allowed for residents to pass from one side of the deep valley to the other. Coffee was sampled by five of the most significant coffee plantations in the region and each of the five raw coffee beans were offered to the shared commuters on the gondola to taste. The coffee bean selection data was transmitted back to the gallery space to activate one of five automated kinetic coffee dispensers (coffee type corresponding to the bean selected) to drip coffee onto one of five 25 kilo sugar cubes that the artists made in a local baker's oven. Over time these single coffee drips caused the sugar cubes to dissolve into a new mountainous Manizales landscape, serving as a topological map of the individual moments of exchange.