All Directions at Once is a web-based artwork by Luiza Prado de Oliveira Martins that charts histories of reproductive control in Brazil. The animated graphic essay relies on the input of a user: when they stop moving the cursor, the website layers vividly colored, flashing GIFs and texts that shift between provocations and poetic reflections. Moving the cursor reactivates the animation and produces a new composition. With each visit to the website, the user thus creates a unique iteration of the artwork.
The first internet-based work to enter the Art Institute’s collection, All Directions At Once is presented at the museum in a mixed-media immersive display. Monitors play recorded demonstrations of the interactive website while the wallpaper presents an analog version of Prado’s florid graphics.
Prado is a Berlin-based Brazilian artist and writer who researches the relationships between reproductive technologies and colonialism; her work emphasizes narratives of resistance and revolution. All Directions at Once is part of Prado’s larger, ongoing project A Topography of Excesses, which explores herbalist reproductive medicine in Brazil as an expression of radical communal care.
Explore the online version of All Directions at Once on your own at https://alldirectionsatonce.artic.art/.
