The Fourth Revolution, the digital revolution, has opened doors to immense possibilities. Data seems to travel fast, free of constraints and physical boundaries, appearing to reside in the cloud, devoid of physical substance. In reality, the cloud is a tangible architecture, existing within a building, a factory where inputs enter and manipulated outputs emerge. To travel, the information we see projected on the screen is the outcome of various physical phenomena: presence and absence of light within the fibre optic cables, radio wavelengths modulated to 'discretize' into 0s and 1s, and finally, allocations of electrical charges within the computer. To build and maintain this system, humans harnessing natural resources: silicon, aluminium, copper, palladium, platinum, tin, indium, gallium, cobalt, lithium. These resources are a premedium, as they are necessary for the creation of the digital, a media for the construction of another media, which demands our immediate attention.
We tend to overlook the material counterpart because we consume the digital in the majority through visual stimuli inhabiting two-dimensional screens. Images and videos have assumed a central role in communication and information dissemination, while corporeity is undervalued. Each image is a physical stimulus, a profound relationship between subjects that emerges from folds, presence or absence, motion, interaction on the surface, which serves as a point of contact between subjects, a place where visual experience intertwines with tactile perception and individual emotions.
Mediaxmedia explores this haptic fabric of relationships through an interactive installation that aims to unveil the technique behind digital images; an open circuit system emits beams of light, the atoms of the digital realm, allowing the participant to intervene and interrupt them, interacting with the projected images and the soundscape. I approach the construction of digital images by taking the machine's point of view: constructing the image matrices with a handcrafted algorithmic methodology, emphasising the relationships with the physical world. I delve into the physical structure of digital images; encouraging the participant to manipulate the RGB colour matrices,shifting, molding, relocating pixels, slowing down the pace, and reflecting on the physical structure of fiber optics, which develops based on the economic convenience of a stigmergetic system.
By touching and interacting, one assumes the viewpoint of the digitally connected machine and returns to the physical matter, the mineral medium from which it is composed: by touching, we are touched. Through contact, we rediscover ourselves through a process of autopoiesis and self-creation.
