en el tiempo, los fantasmas que seremos (teoría del usuario-tiempo)

Each configuration is determined according to the exact moment in which it is observed, without repeating itself. The image displayed at each moment is unique and particular for that moment.

Technical, aesthetic and conceptual development

At the same time he is pampered, nourished, healed and thinks. If we rotate quickly, we adjust. If we orbit slowly, we adjust. Less gravity? We adjust. As soon as we knew how to speak or write, we wanted to give it meaning. We even went so far as to create machines to measure seconds with atoms.

For this reason, it is also coveted as a symbol. We decorate the days and months with gods or emperors that we worship. Concepts that persist even when their empires ceased to exist, and we created new ones with the same symbols, surely (speculation) out of inertia.

Once we normalize a concept, its origin ceases to matter, the history of the symbol becomes a not very useful anniversary. Surely you remember the day you realized (or found out) that Monday comes from the Moon, Tuesday from Mars, etc.

This knowledge does not disappear, but it becomes an object of lesser value. If we describe current societies as ‘knowledge societies’ as Brea does in ‘The Third Threshold’, where she argues that the constitution of these societies is based on the exaltation of ignorance - where ignorance has real rewards and is even used as a tool of political survival - we can see that the cultural takes priority over other ways of valuing the economy.

It becomes more noticeable when we consider the tangible and measurable impact that various forms of social media and hyperconnection had, along with advances in big data capture and analysis.

The more eyes (users) give more attention (time) to a data capture service, the greater its economic return. The profit is such that the organizations that are in charge of maintaining the system pipeline (telecommunications companies, device manufacturing, analysts, social networks themselves, etc.) have become the richest (and most powerful) in the world.

The main mechanism (the other being the monopolization of services) through which users’ time is captured is using culture as a tool. An abbreviated and fleeting culture, characteristics that are a consequence of the compression of time. That is, we produce so much culture simultaneously that in order to absorb it, we reduce the temporal space they occupy.

Nowadays, the need for data capture is not primarily financial remuneration through advertising or the data buying and selling market, but rather the provision of language models produced by each of these organizations. It is clear that the main and most striking consequence of the exploitation of this Big Data, (which at the end of the 2000s was a concern about what to do with this excess of detailed and massive information) are the language models known colloquially as AI (we leave aside the concept of machine learning that does not necessarily operate with something culture as data)

Brea also names them ‘societies of the most cultural capital’, however, I believe that this name is no longer valid as a result of these new systems of cultural propagation. The system that takes precedence over the economic one is the technical one.

It depends on certain conditions given in a system with incentives and mechanisms very different from those inhabited by capitalism, and which are evident when we appreciate the current technological struggle between China and the United States/West where the spearheads of the conflict are telecommunications technologies and those that support them.

It is a system whose greatest search in terms of the technical tools that are set in motion are designed to capture attention, and therefore time.

We could argue that this is true for all types of systems that are based on a linear narrative, which would be true. However, the most important factor is the technical mechanism of the new medium in which the cultural object lives. The transformative potential (pT) of this system is exponentially greater than that of a book, in the same way that a book was compared to a clay tablet.

This new model of society depends on two factors. User-time, that is, the combination of living and mechanical elements that serve to produce data that will later be ingested in pursuit of a product, also used as a propaganda tool to support the political structure that manages real physical space. And then the (unnamed) one who is in charge through bureaucratic, warlike mechanisms, etc. to support the organizations that are in charge of these services.

This work aims to highlight the importance of user-time, emphasizing the need for a present and passive observer (user) to set the work in motion. Like a feed, the work is always different but very similar depending on the linear instant in which it is observed, where the differences between each moment are so imperceptible that they are immediately forgotten, brain rot!

Maybe that’s why I find it terrifying to think about those fish that have a memory for only three seconds.

Literature

BREA, José Luis. “Breve (y desordenado) antiglosario… sobre el arte electrónico” (2002).

BREA, José Luis. “Redefinición de las prácticas artísticas” (2008)