Her name is Amoris cybersis, she is attractive, delicate and moves frantically on a piece of paper with a marker between her legs. The robotic creature barely has a second to breathe. His mission in life is to make visible, in real time, the number of matches that take place on Tinder every hour (an average of 167,000). The resulting drawing will be a mirror of the contemporary search for love, and judging by the activity that unfolds this early in the morning, the day will be hectic. Verbatium connexum is having a much worse time, another of the creatures created by Domestic Data Streamers, which collapsed last night in its attempt to map the average number of messages sent every sixty minutes by WatsApp (4,410 million) and has not been able to reach the presentation of Digital Impact, a stimulating exhibition at the Design Hub where there are humanoids with whom we can converse, gardens that flourish only if we are able to observe them patiently (FutureDeluxe) and the NASA archives are transformed into a beautiful and hypnotic digital fresco ( Refik Anadol).
The little robots of Domestic Data Streamers, a team of designers and researchers who transform complex data and information into artistic installations, are not human, but they are extremely shrewd when it comes to capturing real life in the traces of humanity we leave in the world. digital: our innate desire for acceptance and social validation (4,200 likes an hour on Instagram) or the desire, apparently much less, to share knowledge and collaboratively create 101,500 edits every hour on Wikipedia).
Digital is a mirror of who we are. And it is precisely in that gap, between the physical and the virtual world, where Digital Impact is located, one of the largest exhibitions carried out around digital art, and not only because of the space it occupies (4,000 square meters) but also because of the ambition to bring a broad audience closer to this new way of creating through technology that appeals to issues that affect us very closely and “can transform our way of seeing things,” says Pep Salazar, head of the OFF festival and director of the exhibition promoted by the Disseny Hub and curated by Héctor Ayuso. “Finally, Barcelona values ​​digital artâ€. This time it seems more than a wish. And both the works and the names summoned (true number ones such as Refik Anadol or the Universal Everything collective, together with local creators who have already carved a niche for themselves on the global scene) seem to agree with him.
Who said that this was a cold or aseptic world? Of course, the Lowkeymoves avatar that welcomes us talks and behaves like a human, even warmer than usual. Later we will have the opportunity to verify if it is a common trait by chatting with the two colleagues who are waiting for us inside in what seems like a city from science fiction from the sixties, with large avenues and futuristic domes designed by Toni Arola, who with the only help of light immerses us in a celestial fantasy in which we are as soon in a northern lights as in the precipice of a storm.
Because more than seeing, here there is much to feel and experience. The Mexican Josue Ibáñez transforms the environment in which he lives into millions of particles that drift as we pass through them. The British collective Universal Everthing evokes the movement of the millions of people who live in cities, some of whom we will only see once, through a piece of video art in which characters created from a code parade endlessly. , No two are the same. The British artist Quayola transforms images of the stormy seas of Cornwall into a beautiful moving canvas in which the pictorial material is pixels and the reality of the water crashing on the rocks gradually fades into a peaceful abstraction.
The works, inside the domes or on gigantic screens, are reborn daily and have the ability to turn issues that have to do with our way of acting and inhabiting the world into images. The threat of climate change (the London study FIELD.IO makes use of Artificial Intelligence to show us the geology of the Earth from a satellite of the future), the effects of the pandemic on passenger traffic at Barcelona airport turned into three poetic sculptures by Brendan Dawes or mercury, an element whose prohibition will put an end to the old projectors and which Alba G. Corral takes as the starting point for a piece of generative art in which the god and the planet of the same also make an appearance name.
