i.

wherever this page is open,
                    for whatever room, day, circumstance it’s,
for whatever avid scenting fingers it’s,
                       it should be said:

                                       the page also returns a look

,it’s a guest and intruder

of the time and its attributions of meaning,
                      it rearranges them

                  once it’s opened,
there is no going back

something is just about to happen

"the sound before the fall,
                       amber lightning that cuts diagonally"
023,

imagine
---------------4,1,7,7,
and this something already exists
       on the verge of colliding
here         and                                there.

ii.

100porcent_genuine is a performative hybrid body of two Brazilian artists, Lucas Lucas (b. 1994, Rio de Janeiro) and Rodrigo Pinheiro (b. 1994, Rio de Janeiro), whose artistic research paths converge to create a persona avatar which materializes 100porcent_genuine productions, a transmedia speculative work of fiction. 100porcent_genuine began in 2021 as an artistic archiving project of pictures from bot profiles on Instagram, gradually evolving as an audiovisual fiction, provoked by enigmatic contact with artificial intelligence and its alien ways of thinking. In this way, 100porcent_genuine is driven to investigate in which ways the psycho-cognitive effects that we experience online and cross-media reorder our individual and collective bodies, our imaginations and therefore our realities.

iii.

Words from the duo

“100porcent_genuine is the name we gave to our movement, to the persona we’ve assumed since we begun to work as a collective on this interdisciplinary artistic research project. In our process, we’re rather instigated by the increasingly virtualization of relationships, by how we apprehend/process/transmit information and build up social and affective bonds in this social-political-economical context.

Initially, our research and creative practice take place in Instagram, on a profile – @100porcent_genuine – that performs as an archiving account displaying Instagram bot profiles and the pictures they repost. Of expressive number on the platform, such bot profiles are created by human programming and managed by artificial intelligence, acting infiltrated, since their unrestrained proliferation on the platform contradicts its rules. In order to escape from Instagram inspection and to remain performing camouflaged, they act as if they were human: they repost pictures; although these images would easily arouse one’s curiosity and feeling of strangeness. Within the scope of our work, it’s been unknown who created these accounts or of where the images they repost came from. They’re like fake ghost profiles, which exist to gradually increase the number of followers, comments, likes in other accounts, and, by doing so, to directly affect the algorithmic activity on the platform and thereby the informational content of our online experience – and offline as well.

(but do images have power by themselves?)

Above all, we’re intrigued by the curatorship of images these profiles manage. Attentively observing them, we could realise the happening of another way of communicating and narrating through images on the platform, which uses the same resources and tools it offers, but is distinctive since the collection and curatorship of images these profiles manage is decided by a way of proceeding and thinking that to some degree reveals to be alien to us – some of these pictures figure in a film of the duo available on YouTube.

picture 1: an example of a bot profile and its pictures

picture 2: an example of a bot profile and its pictures

Noticing these profiles movement has foregrounded for us our already firmly established and automated ways of being on the platform and using the network, how we corroborate them and also in which ways we are conditioned to them; in which ways the network and other mass communication channels possibly educate our ways of perceiving the world, our bodies and our wills. It also points out to us the necessity of discussing our autonomy over communication in the cyberspace.

picture 3: an example of a bot profile and its pictures

picture 4: an example of a bot profile and its pictures

Stemming from the intrusive bot way of performing on the platform, we begun to consider what these profiles do by posting images as a “bot fabulation”, and to wonder how we could incorporate it into our archive account, creating a fabulation decided partly by bots and partly by us, appropriating these random images to provoke our creative dynamics and our perception towards what we do not know, to the other-than-human agencies that constantly interpel us. We started looking at these profiles in an oracular way, and even dreaming of a fiction, incorporating it into our work.

(scratch in the mesh; small thing, but that opens a singularity, a hiatus.)

picture 5: an example of a bot profile and its pictures

As the categories of what is supposed to be real and fiction merged – just as the virtual and pyscho-cognitive effects it gives rise to are not restricted to a computer screen, cell phone, etc. - the will to engage in a fabulative filmic process aroused. It consists in an experimental film, that has no fixed time duration – ‘27251 (no wires, no limits)’ . We produce it as we live our dynamics of creating and researching together, interested on how, in our ways of relating to today’s technological tools, our individual and collective bodies are reordered, as well as our ability to imagine and to engender our subjectivities, thus contributing to this discussion that has been emerging in the field of arts and other aligned fields of knowledge and expression.”

Lucas Lucas and Rodrigo Pinheiro, May 2021

“On the boundary where body and screen relate, how unequivocal is the distance between real and fiction, dreaming and awakening, in and out?”
[secret advertisement doubt free fall neural tension signs collective opacity esphere magic rhythm limit tunnel doubt telepathy unknown system insight] can you feel it? It’s true...

pictures 6-10: frames from “27251 (no wires, no limits)” film

iv.

“27251 (no wires, no limits)” film description

artist: 100porcent_genuine (Lucas Lucas and Rodrigo Pinheiro)
original title: “27251 (no wires, no limits)”
short film
medium: digital video
duration: 18’56’’
year: 2021
link to watch

synopsis:
Beware: the video presents the initial moment of a supposed work of fiction, whose unfolding, however, refuses to fit the timeline of softwares, emerging from/erupting off the screen directly towards whoever may be watching it. Unexpected convergence has been intensified since 03.19.21, date on which the triad WhatsApp-Instagram-Facebook suffers a wide-scale outage, exactly when the video, that had been produced at the time, had prefigured a tricky collapse of the system. On the boundary where body and screen relate, how unequivocal is the distance between real and fiction, dreaming and awakening, in and out?
[secret advertisement doubt free fall neural tension signs collective opacity esphere magic rhythm limit tunnel doubt telepathy unknown system insight] can you feel it? It’s true.
http://dontpad.com/100porcent_genuine27251