Martín Bonadeo

Martín Bonadeo

April 9, 2014
International visiting scholar Martín Bonadeo's multi-faceted career merges art, technology, and human networks.

Marketer. Conceptual artist. Web and new media consultant. Copywriter. Musician. Creative director. Professor. These are only a few words describing the many roles of visiting international scholar Martín Bonadeo.

A native of Argentina and former ad man, Bonadeo is a professor of Latin American and Argentine contemporary art at Universidad Católica Argentina (UCA), a Richmond partner university in Buenos Aires.

Bonadeo is teaching two classes in spring 2014 in Richmond’s Latin American and Iberian Studies Department: Art and Culture in Contemporary Latin America and The Avant-Garde in Latin America. Sharing his research with students, he has immersed himself in the study of Latin American art movements, such as “hot minimalism” that preceded the scene in which he and fellow contemporary artists participate today.

Creating installations that may incorporate technology, light, sound, and scent, Bonadeo has shown his work in Europe, Asia, North America, and Argentina.

He scans the landscape for new developments in the relationship between humans and technology. “I believe in people networks powered up by electronic networks,” he said. “There is something about the culture now, and how new media is related to art. Everyone is becoming an artist with all the new media and technology with things like Instagram, for example.”

His interest in the relationship of art, science, and technology reaches from his post-doctorate studies to his work today at UCA, where he founded and directs TECAT (Taller Experimental de Ciencia, Arte y Tecnología), a multidisciplinary center for studying technological issues.

Ever incorporating technology with the human network and art, Bonadeo uses Skype sessions in his Richmond classes for live interaction with contemporary artists abroad such as Mexican Arcángel Constantini. He encourages students to make their own readings and theses and to “decode” the art they study.

“As an artist, you are like a coder,” he said. “You can write, you can draw, you can make a shape, or an experience. As an artist that is what I do. I make shows, and I expose problems in an exposition. I don’t know that I will have the solutions for the problems, but I will show them.”

Martín Bonadeo and Bells at Boatwright

Bonadeo will present an original work April 14-18 when he will compose and perform “Wind Chimes,” at the University carillon at Boatwright Memorial Library Tower and Byrd Park Carillon.

Using wind measurements taken locally during the previous 24 hours, he will write the music about an hour before each performance. The measurements provide him with a cypher that he develops into a “soundification” — a sound representation of the data.

He developed the idea for the composition when he heard a carillon and wondered if he could “hack the system” and “get inside and play something that is not music.”

Photo: Martín Bonadeo at University of Richmond Boatwright Memorial Library Tower