"Refreshing Luis Miguel", Interview with Virginia Alberdi, 2006

When we didn't even dream of talking about digital art in our country and computers were a remote dream, Luis Miguel Valdés was there, like a demiurge, creating artistic possibilities from the nascent information technologies. When the Pablo Center and its enthusiastic promoter, the poet and filmmaker Víctor Casaus, took seriously to promote this artistic expression in Cuba, many remembered that Luis Miguel Valdés —and Frémez, always ahead — had been pioneers.

It does not fall from heaven then that in this VIII Salon of Digital Art, Luis Miguel is one of the guardian angels of the good news, with the expansion of his project CTRL-ALT-DEL, a code that on the keyboard was conceived from the beginning to Refresh the memory.

Whoever passes these days by the locations where the event takes place, will notice signs of the artist's passage. They are fragmented signals, but not for that reason discouraging: LMV breaks away the signs of its visual identity, the architectural traces of the city, the cohabitation between the vernacular and the overcoming of it. We will have to go to the Pablo Center itself to appreciate how this puzzle makes sense in a proposal that points in a first reading towards the conflict between art and technology and, in a second, towards something much more transcendent: to put it in Lezamian terms, the articulation between image and possibility.

LMV lives between Mexico and Havana. He is one of the greatest animators in our environment of the relationship between tradition and graphic innovation. He does not allow himself to be fooled by technological gadgets, but rather works to make the medium (that technology) a tool, never an end.

His presence in the Hall should be understood as an art lesson. From art to dry, be it digital or not. Of art to enjoy regardless of the support and the instruments. That is art.

Virginia Alberdi Benitez
VIII HALL OF DIGITAL ART
Pablo de la Torriente Brau Center
Havana, Cuba - June 2006