Headswitch

“Headswitch” is an interactive application that displays a “head” in the center of the canvas that changes appearance when clicked and activates a lamp switch that turns on a light from above.

Technical, aesthetic and conceptual development

This sketch has two states, “asleep” and “awake”, at the beginning when everything is dark the head shows a noise texture like a television without signal, representing a feeling similar to that of a sleeping limb and, when you click on the canvas and the light is turned on, the head lights up revealing a new texture of moving eyes, the change between these two states is abrupt and does not have a defined animation in contrast to that of the switch located in the upper corner of the canvas that moves slowly with each click. My intention in making this work was to represent the feeling of pressure to meet the expectations of others, the loss of one’s own identity and the emotional exhaustion that this generates.

According to Inke Arns, “Software art does not refer to software merely as a pragmatic and invisible tool that generates certain visible results, but, on the contrary, focuses on the code of the program itself.”1, then, if the true art is found in the code, I believe that the best way to present this work is through the web editor p5.js, since this reveals the internal code of the sketch unlike, for example, a virtual art gallery.

Literature

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