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 there are on Tinder every hour (an average of 167,000). The resulting drawing will be a mirror of the contemporary search for love, and taking into account the activity that unfolds this early in the morning, the day will be hectic. Much worse is going through Verbatium connexum , 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 WhatsApp (4.41 billion ) and could not make it in time for the presentation of Digital impact, a stimulating exhibition in the Design Hub, where there are humanoids with whom we can converse, gardens that bloom 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 small 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 the traces of humanity we leave in the digital world : our innate desire for acceptance and social validation (4,200 likes per hour on Instagram) or the considerably smaller drive to share knowledge and create collaboratively (101,500 edits per hour on Wikipedia).
Digital is a mirror of who we are. And it is precisely in this interstice, between the physical and the virtual world, where Digital impac t is located, one of the largest exhibitions held around digital art, and not only because of the space it occupies (4,000 square meters) , but because of the ambition to bring this new way of creating to a wide audience through technology that appeals to issues that affect us very closely and “can transform the way we see things”, he points out Pep Salazar, head of the OFF festival and director of the exhibition promoted by the Design Hub, with Héctor Ayuso as curator. “Finally Barcelona highlights digital art”. It seems more than wishful thinking. Both the works and the names (genuine number ones like Refik Anadol or the Universal Everything collective, with local creators who shine on the global stage) seem to prove him right.
Who said this was a cold or aseptic world? Without a doubt, the Lowkeymoves avatar that welcomes us speaks and behaves like a human, even being warmer than usual. Then we will have the opportunity to check if it is a common trait by chatting with the two colleagues who are waiting for us inside in what looks like a city born from the science fiction of the sixties, with large avenues and futuristic domes designed by Toni Arola , which with the help of light immerses us in a heavenly fantasy in which we are as soon in an aurora borealis as in the abyss of a storm.
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 Everything evokes the traffic 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, not there are two alike. The British Quayola transforms images of the stormy seas of Cornwall into a beautiful moving canvas in which the pictorial material is the pixels and the reality of the water crashing on the rocks fades into a placid abstraction.
The works, inside the domes or on gigantic screens, are reborn every day and have the ability to turn into images questions that have to do with the way we act and live in the world. The threat of climate change (the London-based study FIELD.IO turns to artificial intelligence to show us the geology of the Earth from a satellite of the future), the effects of the pandemic on the traffic of passengers at Barcelona airport turned into three poetic sculptures by Brendan Dawes or mercury, which is the element whose ban will put an end to the old projectors and which Alba G. Corral takes as a starting point for a piece of ‘generative art in which the god also makes an appearance and likewise the planet of the same name.
