thinking about art after the mediabody to risks, which in his childhood and youth had often been subjected to violence,
and presented this body as mishandled and suffering, but also passionate and rebellious.
in germany, mercado came more into contact with the worlds of concepts, philosophy,
natural sciences, and the intellect. in the new european laboratories for the production
of immaterial values mercado met masters of advanced electronic production: david
larcher, who was his mentor for a short time; anthony moore, with whom he undertook
in- depth sound research; and the polish video compositeur par excellence, zbigniew
Rybczyński. mercado became acquainted with very expensive advanced digital tools
from world- leading discreet logic inc., which in the 1990s launched the special effects
toolsets Flame, Flint, and Inferno, a trio of complete effects systems that precipitated an
enormous leap in the capabilities of visual effects systems and cost as much at that time
as a well- paid white- collar worker earned in a year. mercado learnt to play with them as
if on a keyboard; physically, he became one with them.
mercado refuses to acknowledge the separation of the physical and the metaphysical.
For him the electronic machines have become the interface between the two worlds. in
this way he overcomes their much- stressed dualism. in his animations the images of the
maltreated bodies of people and animals have dissolved, like in an acid bath. in certain
sequences they suddenly appear again, in the original, as reminders.
in various parts of his research process mercado operates like an experimental
biologist. he soaked several pages of marx’s Das Kapital in water, gave them to
mealworms to eat, and then took samples for dna testing. The resulting genetic code
sequences he used to organize his complex material. Foetuses are implanted in digital
landscapes and robbed in these images of their ostensibly inviolable uniqueness. and
time and again mercado takes different editions of marx’s book into real landscapes
and attempts to connect the artificial artefact directly with its natural sources. in one
such Kapital excursion, mercado visited the graves of Rainer Werner Fassbinder and
Figure 17.2 marcello mercado, Screenshot, pencil and ink on paper, discreet- logic- Flint software,
silicon- graphics hardware, 18cm × 14.4cm, 1999.