Circuits of the Future in Carlos Ortúzar and the Temporal Drift in "The Human and Art"

At the Santiago Museum of Contemporary Art (MAC), as part of its current temporary exhibition, we can find the exhibition titled "MAC Collection: Inhabited Memory" on the first floor. It features an exhibition by Carlos Ortúzar (1935-1985), featuring three restored silkscreens (dampened, ironed, and chromatically reintegrated) entitled "Three Humanonauts," "Colloquium of the Humanonauts," and "Transformation" (1966-1967).
Initially, it could be considered a "triptych dialogue" to present the public with a retroactive experience that explores the evolution of his era and the possible technological derivations of the imaginaries of a future.
Neofigurative Anatomy and Social Diagram
In 1967 and 1968, in the context of Latin American politics and the height of the Cold War, Ortúzar conceived “Three Humanonauts,” “Colloquium of the Humanonauts,” and “Transformation” as exercises in technophilic neofiguration.

“Three Humanonauts” shows three body-structures “intervened” by geometric prostheses, with flat colors that participate and dialogue with the silkscreen series of Latin American Pop.\

For its part, “Colloquium of the Humanonauts” arranges the figures in numerical dialogue with softer figures in a kind of astronautical spatial communication. The silkscreen technique on paper, with the inscription of color planes, transforms the medium into a relationship of “technical separation and coexistence” between the organic and the mechanical. The handwritten inscriptions on the obverse of the works act simultaneously as a signature and as a "trace" of authorship in the "age of mechanical reproduction."
From a poststructural perspective, these pieces could be "read" as fragmented signs, where each humanoid represents a post-industrial subject, while the triseminal composition—three bodies (there is a fourth encapsulated/hibernated in the work "Transformation")—stresses the dialectic of the individual and the collective.

In "Transformation," industrial matter is no longer a neutral medium, but rather part of an active pre-individuation that participates in the narrative of a "dichotomous modernity," where, on the one hand, there is awe at technical and scientific advances and, on the other, the fragility of the human in the face of the political machinery of the Cold War. Reflecting on these pieces leads us to feel that Ortúzar was not only a "chronicler" of his time, but also part of the agency in the representation of possible futures.

During these periods, Latin American art transitioned between the modernist legacy and new critical poetics that questioned the neutrality of exhibition space. The pieces in the Humanonauts series exhibit bodies intervened by gears and geometric forms, evidencing a hybridization between the human figure and the machine that harks back to the prevailing scientific visuality of the decade.
Interactive Anachronism

In a theory of "interactive anachronism," I could hasten to propose that each of Ortúzar's works can be transduced into three temporal "micro-assemblages": its physical materiality between 1966 and 1967, its actualizing "performative archive" in 2025, and its possible "digital, post-digital, posthumanist, and perhaps hyperhumanist" projection in speculative futures. This perspective clearly would not correspond to the notion of linear chronology, but rather would posit art as a disruptive event that simultaneously inhabits multiple presents.

By reactivating these works in a positively anachronistic display, the MAC achieves its role as a mediator that preserves, reveals, and projects a legacy transcendent in the epochal and—perhaps unbeknownst to the artist—immanent in the digital projection. In this way, the exhibition would not only be an encounter with Ortúzar's artistic past, but also an attempt at a prospective diachrony of presents, as well as futures, and of futures yet to be formed at the intersection of art, technology, science, and time.
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