John Downey

(Chile, 1940-New York, 1993)

A precursor of video art and electronic art, he developed his work in different media: engraving, painting, performance and installation. He conceives art as a mechanism of social intervention and positions himself as a “cultural communicator and an activating aesthetic anthropologist, whose medium of visual expression is video.” After graduating as an architect in Chile, his artistic interests led him first to Paris and later to New York where he began to develop as a recording artist and then to experiment with new technologies. Come into contact with different artistic groups, exploring and redefining contemporary art using video as a tool. Always committed to the problems of society and in search of otherness, he began a journey that took him from New York to South America, filmed as a story, he created Video Trans Américas (1973-1976), an innovative work that understood the complexity of the indigenous context. and expands the possibilities of video and his own experience as an “observing” artist. Chile is an insistent theme in his work, as reflected in Map of Chile (Anaconda) (1975) and About Cages (1987), installations that convey the experience of torture, repression and injustice. In Meditations, technology allows you to expand materiality, creating a cybernetic utopia, pondering the possibilities of creating communities and networks in a new type of democratic society.