Ansiedad Estocolmica

A tired, exhausted, anxious eye: a reflection on the present day and on how our bodies respond to overstimulation.

Technical, aesthetic, and conceptual development

This artistic production seeks to express, in a single image, the feeling of being overwhelmed that most people in today’s society experience. This feeling is due, among other things, to the subjection our brains are exposed to by being in contact almost all the time with screens and audiovisual content such as ads, news, photographs, reels and the like. These enter our psyche as bursts of information (and overinformation), generating a constant craving for dopamine and, consequently, emotional ups and downs that accompany us throughout the day. These algorithms are thus designed to experiment with the emotionality of those who consume them, personalizing the experience and seeking to make this feeling of “informational subjection” seem natural to the members of society.

This work does not seek to be part of that phenomenon, but rather to mark a moment of reflection so that this problem is taken into account. It uses as inspiration the collection “Oscillons” by the artist Ben F. Laposky. Sine waves (oscillation patterns that serve as a fundamental building block for modeling and analyzing physical and complex phenomena) were taken as a reference to simulate the latent waves of overinformation that flood the applications to which individuals are exposed today, on the vast majority of communication devices.

The work rests on the fact that information is more than just a concept of knowledge: today it has become a concept of power in the hands of very small circles of senders, who use it purely for their own convenience, alienating the masses from control over their own psychological well-being and creating a relationship of dependence on that “shot of emotion”. It relates this “overproduction of information” to a relationship of power, as José Luis Brea points out in his manifesto “Redefinition of artistic practices”: “the fact that immaterial production and the circulation of meaning, of information, are becoming the most important modes of exchange in emerging societies.”

Bibliography

• Brea, J. L. (2008). Redefinición de las prácticas artísticas (s21).
• Ben F. Laposky (1950). Oscillons.