Anquiloglosia

This work seeks to expose how childhoods today last less than previous ones. How loneliness accompanies you from a very young age and there is no way to escape it. No matter how much time passes, social-political binary systems condition and compress us. How the presence of screens generates over-adaptations in children, “they talk about things they don’t know”, between dreaming and innocence they reach the darkest places in history, understood as the “fact”, the permanent record that accumulates, overcrowds and explodes. This results in a madness that allows us to transcend any value pre-established by this rotten and selfish society.

Technical, aesthetic and conceptual development

“The mediation of images imposes a distance, and the distance creates a space in which words can resonate and multiply their expression beyond the utilitarian.”(Aira, p.01). I use a photo taken by me on the day of my sister and cousin’s communion. It was autumn and we had a family reunion to celebrate the closeness to God that they had gained after 6 arduous months of praying and asking for forgiveness.

The work consists of a photo in which an infant appears alone in the middle of a green field. By directing the mouse towards the upper right corner, laughter is activated, which in turn covers the ground with white circles, and if the mouse is redirected towards the lower left corner, cries are activated, covering “the ground” with black rounds. I base myself on the comparison that Arns Inke makes with respect to Software Art and Generative Art to be able to talk about today’s childhoods crossed directly by screens.

Arns proposes that both Software Art and Generative Art are modes of creation that are defined through the interaction of the code and with the medium (tool) and how that interaction affects directly or in a round trip with the space, the public and the environment. These types of art are not only visual creations or artistic objects, but involve an active process of mediation and production of meaning through programmed systems that in turn can generate unpredictable and dynamic results.

He explains that in both artistic forms the code is the medium, but also the protagonist, what is produced is not only a static work, but the code itself is a participant that generates something in interaction with the public, the context or the systems in which it is deployed. Similarly, the screens that children are exposed to act as mediators of their experiences, emotions and relationships. As in Generative Art, where the process and interaction between software and viewer create unpredictable results, in today’s digital world, children interact with platforms that not only display content, but are also programmed to manipulate what they consume.

This process of digital mediation, too, can generate unexpected effects on the emotions and relationships of childhood, just as generative art systems can produce unpredictable results. In both cases, the “autonomy” of the process is mediated by something that is not always controlled by the subject: the algorithm or the code.

Noises correspond to two basic sensations: happiness and sadness. That the canvas is divided into two, differentiated by black and white, is no coincidence. The upper half refers to the desire to be able to preserve the naivety and curiosity of the first years of life, which are exciting and disorienting, while the lower half refers to the pit and confusion that screens and loneliness can generate in a child.

I choose the image of my cousin Roma who is 4 years old (photo) because she is one of the few children who excitedly accepts going for a walk in the park. Personally, I think that adults today should stop having children. There is no longer an accompanied education but rather an acceleration of growth, thus generating a gap in maturation that will have an impact on its adult version.

Literature

AIRA, César. ([2013], 2016). “Sobre el arte contemporáneo” en Sobre el arte contemporáneo. Buenos Aires: Literatura Random House, pp. 11-56. (DAA: 1:02m)

ARNS, Inke. (2005). “El código como acto de habla performativo”. En Revista Artnodes, Julio de 2005, ISSN 1695-5951