Antoni Abad i Roses

Antoni Abad i Roses, Lleida (1956)

Between the late eighties and early nineties, Antoni Abad focused on the development of mobile sculptures that, accompanied by photographic sequences, already inquired into the possibilities of the expanded and moving image. After a period as artist-in-residence at The Banff Centre for the Arts (Alberta, Canada), he began working with the videographic medium, without renouncing to the spatial and architectural concerns of his earlier work, as we can see in the piece Últimos deseos (Latest Wishes), 1995, which was presented in 1999 at the Venice Biennale curated by Harald Szeemann. In 1996, following an invitation from Roc Parés for the platform ‘MACBA online’, a project initiated by the Universitat Pompeu Fabra and MACBA, Abad made Sisyphus, a video installation that reinterprets the classic myth and that also unfolds into a new version for the web: his first foray into the Internet. In 1997 he made a further video installation, Natural Sciences, which investigated users’ reactions of empathy and repulsion.

Since then Antoni Abad has focused on digital media, making proposals as emblematic as Z (2001–3), a work that anticipates the use of social networks, where users interact with each other by downloading to their computers a virtual fly allowing for collective and simultaneous interaction. The Z project was presented at MACBA in 2002 and received the Ciutat de Barcelona 2003 award in the Multimedia category.

Based on the above-mentioned investigations, megafone.net pioneers the exploration of other possible social and communicative uses for mobile phone technologies, which were in wide use at the end of the last century.

abadantoni(at)gmail.com