Proto-portfolio
From Fine arts 80s-90s extravaganza to applied Internet arts.
In my opinion, there is a small gap between art and advertising. They often cross each other's areas of execution or paths.
I like the German word Gestaltung. It describes perfectly what we do as creative people.
I was trained as an artist. Life took me to Art School. I studied and met with some of the most important conceptual and performance artists of the 70s.
After graduating I partly lived from my art. Sometime in the mid 90s I discovered the Internet and I migrated my interest towards that new world.
I had found in this new medium, the perfect excuse for applying my belief that art should be more democratic and especially, that it be more accessible to anyone interested in being a creator.
The Exhibition Opening
In my artwork I explored the idea of the artist as a myth and the idea that any human activity can be seen as art. These thoughts were strongly influenced by the work of Joseph Beuys.
Today they call it working on your personal brand. Being a creator, influencer, content maker. Beuys was right.
Designing the exhibition flier was an important part of the whole oeuvre thing. It was the marketing part of the art piece.
These were, in its majority, done in conjunction with graphic designers. Apple Computers and self publishing software like Quarkxpress were the thing. No commercial Internet yet.
It's unfortunate the great majority of these art show invitations and almost all of my original artwork has been lost while moving way too many times from places, towns and countries.
But somehow it also shows how design and marketing were taking shape in my work.
My First FTP
For me the next stop, The Internet. I was back in the US, mid 90s. Netscape had arrived. The ISP was called The Pipeline. It gave its users an email address and more specially, some shared space on a server that could be accessed via a browser.
The first thing I uploaded to my space on the server was a small and static .GIF file using an FTP protocol.
This allowed me to type an URL on the browser and see on the Internet what I had just uploaded to the World Wide Web.
This blew my mind wide open.
I saw it as the place where conceptual and commercial had made a baby. And at that moment decided that is where my future as a creator was. Vento[dot]org was born in 1998.