Luis Camnitzer (German, 1937) is a renowned Uruguayan intellectual, artist, and thinker on art and its social function in the contemporary world. He lives in New York but maintains and nurtures his deep-rooted ties to Uruguay, the country where he was educated and lived until the age of 27.
The pedagogical foundations for an art practice oriented toward the formation of critical subjects, as well as the problems of power in its concept and exercise, have been topics around which Camnitzer developed much of his theoretical reflection and his conceptualist artistic operations.
In *The Resurrection of Simón Rodríguez: The Dictionary of Power* , he returns to these themes, invoking the ideals of the Caracas-born educator and revolutionary Simón Rodríguez (1749–1854) regarding the need for an education aligned with the independence perspectives opened in America by Simón Bolívar.
To establish contact with those ideals and trace their most relevant core elements, the artist adopts two different resources: on the one hand, Intelligence Artificial intelligence, which operates by selectively searching for data to algorithmically reconstruct the concepts requested of it; on the other hand, the intervention of mediums, whose ability to 'dialogue with spirits' enables direct contact with the source, avoiding the indirect and depersonalized path of algorithmic information.
The juxtaposition of these two procedures is the way in which Camnitzer operates artistically, reclaiming, at the same time, the cognitive power of art and the diversity of forms of knowledge, at a time when both are threatened by Artificial Intelligence.
This text has been translated into English.
