30 Oct 2025
Interview with José Ramón Alcalá - Art, Museums and Digital Cultures Cluster
Interviewby José Pardal Pina
'For the last 40 years we have insisted on asking those responsible for the large (and small) museums of contemporary art to assume their responsibility of incorporating all these new disciplines and artistic practices without realising that the – misnamed - museums of contemporary art are in reality discursive structures that have been reinvented - and specifically designed - to welcome, house, manage, exhibit and disseminate all the movements of the artistic avant-gardes of the 20th century, using, for this purpose, the museographic model known as “White Cube”.'
José Ramón Alcalá is an authoritative voice in what concerns New Media Art, with a long curriculum that spans from the early use of electronic devices in art to the creation of institutions aimed at preserving, exhibiting, and investigating electronic and media art. The International Museum of Electrography – Centre for Innovation in Art and New Technologies (MIDECIANT) serves as a beacon for the evolution and application of technology in art.
The interview that follows is a rich testimony of his work, and a highly critical one that many directors, gallerists, curators and artists should contemplate, in a system still favouring outdated modes of production and exhibition-making, regardless of new and hybrid forms of art that the 21st century has been developing.
Still fighting for the inclusion of these artists and their artworks in the art system, Ramón Alcalá confesses, nevertheless, his disappointment, but also his ever-enthusiastic approach to new media art and new modes of creation.
José Pardal Pina: When did your interest in electronic and media art begin, and what are you currently working on?
José Ramón Alcalá: My interest in Electronic & Media Art began during my Fine Arts studies in 1982-83, in a Motion Drawing class. The professor asked us to draw the model as she moved naked across the classroom walkway. That night, I thought that if I wanted to capture the movement of a person as they walked in an updated way, the best way to do it creatively, would be through the use of some kind of scanning technology. I came up with the idea of using the scanner lamps on one of the photocopiers my father had in his office. I spent the entire following night photocopying parts of my body moving across the screen to the rhythm of its lamps. These ‘artistic’ photos were a great discovery for me (but not for my professor, who failed me).
From that moment on, I had a true obsession with generating technical images using any machine within my reach: photocopiers, fax machines, repromasters, cyanotypes, heliographs, etc. Thanks to a grant from the Canon office in Valencia—my city— I was able to work intensively and deeply with electromechanical reproduction machines.
Months later, I was already part of the international Copy Art movement. I teamed up with my classmate, Fernando Canales, to form the Alcalacanales team, whose works and artistic projects were exhibited in numerous countries until Fernando Canales died of cancer in 1995 at the age of 34. In addition to producing and exhibiting works and artistic installations related to the creative use of new technologies, Fernando and I taught numerous workshops, published several books and manuals, and gave numerous lectures and presentations.
In 1988, along with other young artists and theorists from very avant-garde disciplines, I was hired to found the Faculty of Fine Arts of Cuenca (part of the University of Castilla-La Mancha), whose curriculum revolutionised the academic landscape of fine arts. I am currently a Professor of Art and New Technologies here. A year after joining the Faculty of Fine Arts in Cuenca as a professor, I founded the Cuenca International Electrography Museum (now MIDECIANT), which I directed until 2018. In its New Technology workshops and laboratories, I have experimented, created, and researched the use of digital technologies to this day.
Currently, my main activity focuses on experimentation with generative Artificial Intelligence programmes, updating teaching methodologies for New Technologies for Art, and theorising and proposing alternative models for the exhibition and dissemination of contemporary art (New Media Art). I am currently collaborating on the development of cisma.art, an independent space for the production and dissemination of the most innovative artistic practices. Hybrid in nature (physical and virtual), it has several locations in the Spanish city of Valencia and a powerful online digital platform.
José Pardal Pina: You’re one of the authors and scholars with the most experience in the field of digital media, having directed several institutions in Spain. How can we assess the impact of the so-called digital turn in Spanish cultural institutions?
José Ramón Alcalá: As I've mentioned before, I'm particularly involved and committed to the renewal of structures and systems for the production, exhibition, and dissemination of New Media Art—proposing alternative models— focusing on the Spanish context and, for the past two years, particularly on the city of Valencia. During my previous time in Madrid, I was Vice President of the Spanish Institute of Contemporary Art (IAC), where I had the privilege of measuring the ‘ambient temperature’ of the Spanish Contemporary Art System from within. I did so at great personal sacrifice, but with the conviction that the bleak Spanish panorama could and should be managed from within, from the artistic and cultural institutions themselves.
It was a serious miscalculation. It's not possible, probably due to the Spanish character.
In any case, my conclusion is that ‘official’ art thrives on the functional dynamics generated by the art market (with its structural system of museums and art galleries). This system is completely outdated and disconnected from the synergies and dynamics of new generations because it cannot absorb and manage the specificities of the new digital and multimedia art.
Today, art is either digital, or it isn't, simply because its creators, the artists, are digital individuals who live and manage a digitalised reality supported by a structural system of a hybrid nature. This new art has refused to be served by contemporary art museums (especially the large museums, those that certify—pontificate—the artistic canon). And with this renunciation (the reasons for which I have explained in the latest articles published), they have disconnected from the zeitgeist of our contemporary times, leaving them dysfunctional and out of the game.
Therefore, we have no choice but to look to those few humble proposals, coming from citizen initiatives—or even from artists themselves—outside of all public and institutional affairs and outside the current art system, which are inoculating new—alternative—spaces for the production and dissemination of all these new artistic practices. It is in these spaces that we can conceive and propose new models that can coherently and competently manage the specificity of these new practices, of this new art, which has broken with all the canons and all the traditional paradigms of art.
José Pardal Pina: You’re the founder of the Museo Internacional de Electrografía – Centro de Innovación en Arte y Nuevas Tecnologías (MIDECIANT) [the International Museum of Electrography – Center for Innovation in Art and New Technologies], a pioneering centre and museum for the study and archiving of media art, which you’ve directed until 2018. After thirty-six years since its inception, could you recall the impact of this institution on the cultural sector and media studies?
José Ramón Alcalá: I honestly and humbly believe that the creation of the MIDECIANT was a milestone in the history of museums. First, because until that moment (1989), there was no museum in the world that took into consideration and was dedicated exclusively to electromechanical and digital graphic arts. In fact, a few years after its inauguration, the MIDE was awarded the National Prize from the Spanish Royal Academy of Fine Arts ‘for its innovations in graphic art.’ Secondly, due to its museographic conception as an ‘Artists-run-space,’ that is, a place created by and for artists for the creation, production, and research of New Media Art. This collection builds a collection—unique in the world—and manages it museographically, inventing new museographic models, given that they did not exist at the time. As I have already mentioned, the major contemporary art museums had not taken these new artistic practices into consideration (nor do they today, still) due to their complexity, novelty, and difficulty in musealising (exhibition, preservation, and dissemination).
The Cuenca Electrography Museum quickly became a place of pilgrimage for artists and researchers from all over the world. Today, 36 years after its inauguration, the MIDECIANT can boast of owning and managing several permanent collections (electromechanical graphics, digital graphics, net art, multimedia art, mail art, fax art, etc.) with over 130,000 pieces (inventoried and digitised).
Despite the large number of visits from artists, researchers, and art education centres it receives annually, unfortunately, the lack of support and interest from the university community to which it belongs (the University of Castilla-La Mancha) and local and regional political institutions has left the museum without an exhibition space and with almost no budget. The works are stored neatly (and cared for according to quality standards) in its warehouse and documentation centre. And since New Media Art has not yet been normalised within the art scene (despite its more than 70 years of existence), we could consider that the MIDECIANT—and its collections, workshops, and laboratories— continue to be considered an ‘artistic niche.’
José Pardal Pina: What do you hope for the future of MIDECIANT in terms of mission and objectives, and how can it resist what you’ve highlighted in ‘Conservación de lo intangible o abandono de la idea de conservación’ [‘Conservation of the intangible or abandonment of the idea of conservation’], as the uniformisation of the Web?
José Ramón Alcalá: Although I no longer lead MIDECIANT (but remain very involved in its management and development), its new director, my colleague and friend, Professor of Fine Arts Ana Navarrete, is doing an extraordinarily valuable job. She has understood that, given that MIDECIANT, as a production centre, cannot currently continue its activities due to a lack of resources and support, she is focusing on the work of organisation, archiving, digitisation, and dissemination (through the review and enhancement of its website). This was undoubtedly necessary, given the enormous growth of its heritage.
This work is enormously complex, especially due to its dual nature: physical works and intangible works. Let us not forget that over the course of its 36 years of active life, MIDECIANT has also created, collected, and received important donations of digital, virtual, and online works: multimedia art, interactive multimedia, net.art, and digital post-productions. Videographic works, art generated with Artificial Intelligence, etc. ‘Musealising the intangible,’ as I analyse in many of my articles and publications, is an enormously complex task, mainly because there are no precedents. There is no specific culture created. Very few museums in the world currently have such significant collections of these types of intangible artistic practices. And that implies imagining, designing, and implementing (albeit experimentally) proactive models capable of implementing museography devices up to the task of managing them with coherence, efficiency, and a certain impact.
José Pardal Pina: What strategies can institutions develop to show more electronic media and installations that usually require considerable resources? I expect this to be a divisive or sensitive topic within institutions, especially with the growing uncertainty regarding public funding.
José Ramón Alcalá: I know that the answer I'm going to give to the question you're asking will be highly controversial and will be seen as an overly radical position on my part. However, at this point in my life, after everything I've experienced in these more than 50 years of absolute dedication to the art world, after my tireless attempts to change things —from within and without— and having even had the opportunity on several occasions to exert pressure and influence things from positions of control and command, I must sincerely confess that I've given up. I'm abandoning this chimerical ambition. And I've done so because I've convinced myself that there's neither the will, nor the interest, nor the capacity on the part of museums (their managers and the leaders of the art institution) to assume their responsibility and incorporate Media Art into their collections and departments.
But the most interesting reflection of this radical and pessimistic position - and one that I have only recently realised - is that perhaps it is the approach itself that is wrong: for the last 40 years we have insisted on asking those responsible for the large (and small) museums of contemporary art to assume their responsibility of incorporating all these new disciplines and artistic practices without realising that the – misnamed - museums of contemporary art are in reality discursive structures that have been reinvented - and specifically designed - to welcome, house, manage, exhibit and disseminate all the movements of the artistic avant-gardes of the 20th century, using, for this purpose, the museographic model known as ‘White Cube’.
From this perspective, which understands and defines so-called contemporary art museums as closed models that adhere to and circumscribe their scope of interest to specific artistic practices that existed during a specific period in the history of Western art, my proposal (derived from this reflection, from this personal discovery) would be to request that the currently (mis)named contemporary art museums be renamed ‘Museums of 20th Century Art.’ It may seem like a simple and innocent name change, but it has a profound undertone, as it implies a true revolution that turns everything upside down, leaving an empty field ready to be filled again -as if it were a building site. That is, it clarifies and proposes that these museums - which we have been demanding to expand their scope of action without realising that they are not designed or conceived for that purpose - contemplate only a specific period in the history of art (the end of the 19th century and the entire 20th century, the period in which all avant-garde movements develop). A task they have learned to perform with great efficiency and authority, thanks to the coherent and harmonious use of the aforementioned ‘White Cube’ architectural model.
Thus, and from this new perspective, we now face the pending challenge of inventing, conceiving, designing, and conceiving the museum of artistic practices of the 21st century. No more conflicts of interest, no more intractable problems for the managers of what are currently called ‘contemporary art museums.’ In this way, we would also clarify the terminology, eliminating confusion, especially among young creators, and among the new generations.
José Pardal Pina: You have written widely about the cultural aspects of monsters and imagination in digital media. Is the Internet becoming our own Frankenstein – and I mean this not as an ominous vision of the Internet, but as a visionary, creative take on identity-making?
José Ramón Alcalá: These ‘monsters’ you refer to come from a research project I began in the 1990s and culminated, in 2004, with the curatorship of the exhibition Monsters, Ghosts, and Aliens: Poetics of Representation in Digital Art, organised by the Telefónica Foundation in Madrid. Based on the studies of Art and Teratology developed by my admired friend and colleague in projects and research, the pioneering New Media Art artist Louis Bec, I posited that the imaginaries of the digital age (and their subsequent iconographies) were strongly marked —influenced — by the three great myths of human psychopathology: the one who is not like us and terrifies us (the monster); the one who, because he cannot be grasped due to his lack of carnality, produces unease in us (the ghost); and the one who makes us vulnerable because he is not of this world and we cannot communicate with him (the alien). The digital narratives of the early era harnessed the simulative power —close to magic— of digital image-enhancing programmes (such as Photoshop) to generate, giving concrete form to, all these typologies of human fear.
The current Internet of our dystopian society in the face of technology (which is making us reject everything technological) is the perfect combination of the three psychopathological models described: we have lost its governance (which has been taken away from us and taken over by large technology corporations and economic lobbies); we have become confused (lost in the anxiety of no longer being able to distinguish truth from lies—truth and fake); and we have entered a dangerous state of self-control (having to assume—and manage—on a daily basis a hybrid identity that has not yet mastered its language of communication and representation).
These three situations, which make us so uncomfortable in our daily lives, have transformed the utopian dreams of the pioneers of digital art and culture (in the early 1990s) into a clearly dystopian world, but not in the style of G. Orwell's 1984, but rather in the style of A. Huxley's Brave New World. And this is truly terrifying, from my point of view.
José Pardal Pina: Can we interpret the current political climate through the lens of modern digital cultures? Is it possible to read contemporary political management within the scope of the new ontologies that the digital realms have created?
José Ramón Alcalá: There is no doubt that the operational methods current individuals use to manage their daily lives are conditioned by the way tools (technologies) allow and specifically define them. The political drift in most countries is a consequence of the way politics (and politicians) reach citizens. The constant interference and perversions occurring in communication through teleoperated communication systems (the Internet, social networks, etc.) are marking political trends that are profoundly transforming sociopolitical paradigms. Truth and lies, neutrality or bias, etc., are now confused, with no possibility for the individual to distinguish them. And all this new operability is a consequence of the enormous and unprecedented capacity of new technologies (especially AI algorithms) to produce it.
In this way, only digital literacy and an education that takes discernment into account (as a priority) (working on the mechanisms of criticism and self-criticism) will allow us to restore the citizen's capacity for analysis and, therefore, functional autonomy. The educational challenge, therefore, is to work from the perspective of a new humanism that some define as technohumanism.
But the populist power that is assaulting all democracies and political systems in the world today knows perfectly well that this is its greatest enemy: confronting educated citizens and individuals with a certain intellectual capacity. To achieve this, those of us who consider ourselves responsible for changing the situation know that to achieve this, we must change our way of dealing with technology. The subsequent question is: will we be able to be free in the face of the machine? Can we manage our digital lives with sufficient autonomy? All my efforts are currently focused on this objective/challenge, educating from a new teaching paradigm and creating new models for artistic production and its dissemination.
José Pardal Pina: What would be your position regarding AI creative and generative content, which stems from previous works and content? Do you agree with artists and writers forbidding tech giants from using their works? Is this the best way to deal with copyright policies? Or, to be blunt, should we moralise digital technologies, specifically AI?
José Ramón Alcalá: Honestly, the more I work with AI and learn about its functional mechanisms, as I observe and analyse the creative processes and results of my students and disciples, the more I become convinced that we live surrounded by a lot of urban legend based on the enormous amount of prejudices deeply rooted in the human psyche, and that it is leading people, artists, creators, to fear the loss of control over their production (appropriation of our copyrights that leaves us without economic income), of their creative personality (AI as an author that leaves us without work), of their intuition (AI nullifying our imagination and causing us to lose the habit of being original artists).
The fact is that, when you work in depth with these young artists and get them to learn to analyse, understand, evaluate, and correctly use generative AI programs, you make them discover that all these fears and atavistic prejudices were completely unfounded. And that none of these dangers have to happen.
What we're missing right now is a technological culture and a new understanding of what Artificial Intelligence really entails, precisely defining, from a revised perspective —not traditional or canonical— what we call Human Intelligence and, therefore, what it would entail, how these other non-human intelligences would be characterised.
José Pardal Pina: Automated art has been here for a while now. Automatism has been widely investigated in art history. How should we read, listen to, or contemplate art that is not created by humankind, considering that art-making is deeply connected to the civilisational, universal, and timely aspects of human experience?
José Ramón Alcalá: The answer I'm about to give may be quite disappointing. But honestly, at this point, and based on my experience over the past three years, I consider that trying to obtain ‘non-human’ results from a programme that works with generative AI algorithms (mainly those commercial products offered for free) is a pipe dream. Or better put, it constitutes a falsification of the procedural conditions. Because when I use (as an artist in this case) an algorithm, it works from two premises: to use its immense (almost infinite) database (big data) to develop and construct the response —something that will happen in just a few seconds-; and to connect them with the knowledge —if not deep, then at least expert— that it (the algorithm) has of me as a user (it knows me perfectly, more than I know myself, as a result of its meticulous monitoring of each and every one of my actions with the machine at every moment of my daily life).
What I mean by this is that any result that the AI programme offers me cannot be more human, since it will be based on its immense (statistical) knowledge of the History of Humanity and its specific and particular adaptation to its user (that artist who is trying to produce artworks through the use of the programme and who is a person, an individual who leaves identifiable traces —in the digital world— in every action, in every movement of their life).
Now, if we orient the question towards my opinion about whether it is possible for AI to generate (or ever generate) art creations that are not related to the identity paradigms of the human, then my answer in this case is ‘yes’; ‘yes, but...’, because, at this point, we would still be in the realm of science fiction, because functional autonomy (which implies, in the case of artistic creation, the possession by AI of feelings, intuition and poetic emotion) has not yet occurred (or, at least, has not yet been publicly announced).
BIOGRAPHY
José Pardal Pina has been the associate editor of Umbigo since 2018. He has an Integrated Master's in Architecture from Instituto Superior Técnico, Universidade de Lisboa, and a Post-Graduation in Curatorship from Faculdade de Ciências Sociais e Humanas, Universidade Nova de Lisboa. Curator of the Dialogues (2018-2024) and Landscapes (2025-) projects in Umbigo.
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