Noke’s reading about Rosa Montero

“Tears in the rain” is the title of Rosa Montero’s novel, choosen by Noke Yuitza for her installation for “Immersive wor(l)ds“. I know Noke from many years and she ever fascinated me for her creative impetus. I like to observe her while she works to an installation, with accuracy and care to every details untill the last time. Arte Libera hosted her with pleasure for other two installations and it’s ever an emotion to work with her. This time she has involved me so deep in her work, because she asked me to be her model for three characters of the book, three women in a future world, very different from my common avatar. It was very funny and I was so curious that I’ve red Rosa Montero’s book before the opening for being sure to understand everything I saw.

Two words about Noke: she studies Fine Arts at the University of Barcelona and she has the homologated title in coreography and “escenografía” and Audivisual technician. She is in sl from many years, because she loves to experiment in creativity, finding a link betweeen her passions: art and science.

Here there is Noke’s interview for Immersive wor(l)ds:

Why have you choosen “tears in the rain” for this installation? What in this book has catch you?

We are experimenting a bloom inside social technologies (social medias and metaverse platforms) and technologies that can reproduce life (as those insect robots that uses the NASA or transgenics). So, each day, we are falling into a deeper connexion with technology. In the future, this romance between biologic life and artificial life will be more complex, but how much? And how can affect us?

Lacrime nella Pioggia is one of those big stories, on the line of Blade Runner and Ghost in the Shell, that can imagine a realistic future with sense, one that can be familiar for us although all, with quite similar social situations than we have in this present time and similar way to feel. Probably because Rosa Montero, the author, it’s also a journalists and she has a critic eye for the analysis. And also there it is Bruna Husky, woman, detective and replicant, it’s main character, a well constructed one with a lot of details that approaches us to herself. She lives a complex moment  cause she knows she is going to die in a few years, so she is intense… These united to the concept of the fragility of the memory, one of the strong lines of the book, is what made that a cyberpunk as me choose this book 😉

It’s characters, specially Bruna, and all that one can read in and behind the words. Rosa Montero has created not a book, but an universe with Lacrime nella Pioggia, something very rare to achieve, specially because it’s just one book.

Your installation is very rich and complex, can you tell us something about?

It’s a rich and complex story too, so… I’ve just done here an approach to Bruna, to her evolution along the story. I had other 2 installations, small ones, based on the “story behind the story” of Lacrime nella Pioggia: Future Communities (for the SL9B) and Alien Humanity (for the UWA’s Challenge). The 1st one acts like a pre-story and the second concludes the circle.

Lacrime nella Pioggia is the biggest one and the closer to the book. The installation has 3 floors: the first one, the landing point, introduces the story, the one at the bottom is an incursion inside Bruna and the middle one is her moment of awakening, closer to the end of the story. I also have the special collaboration of the author so when you walk around it, you can listen Rosa Montero’s voice reading some fragments of the original book in Spanish. She is quite cool, one of those artists of the word that it’s closer to people, so when I ask her, she offers her help to me with more than I was waiting. As result, she recorded 16 fragments specially for this intervention.

How you came in this virtual worlds with this desire to experiment?

Social technologies are like candy to me. I love all that is interactive and immersive and specially I’m interested in games as platforms for education and culture. Some years ago I was writing an article about Education and Second Life for the blog of my non-profits Ciència Oberta (Open Science), so i decided to “live the adventure” and download it.

As a result, I ended using SL to develop some projects for them, and also for to present a couple of works for some of my subjects in Fine Arts (Universidad de Barcelona) among a lot more. One was held my Arte Libera: The SandMan, based on ETA Hoffmann’s story. If one has the apple of creativity inside, virtual worlds can be a good tool to use it as interactive canvas and do a lot of creative experiments. They are pure “techno-candies” for developers and artists.

Noke’s  installation will be in Brera untill the end of July, you can see it at this link.

(Simba Schumann, Pictures by Wizardoz Chrome))