AS WE MAY THINK
DSL COLLECTION - COLLABORATION
Photographs by Denis Gorishev
DIGITAL VIDEO INSTALLATION
6 MINUTES. VARIABLE MEASUSURES
In 1945 The Atlantic magazine published an essay by the engineer, scientist and visionary Vannevar Bush called As We May Think, in which he described a hypothetical electromechanical device (never built), conceived as an intimate expanded complement of memory that allows people to develop and read a large autonomous research library, create and follow associative trails of links and personal annotations, and recall these trails at any time to share with others at blazing speed to create a collective knowledge library: Memex.
His visions influenced the development of Hypertext and Hypermedia which ultimately led to the creation of the World Wide Web and the beginning of what we now know as search engines and the infinite mesh of information.
Thanks to technological development and the urgency of the moment, where now everything became digital after the Covid-19, we are governed by an immense transmission of information adapted to mobile phones, tablets, etc. But that constant flow of information and counter-information 24/7, can also throw us into the field of disinformation and encryption and find ourselves in a confusing landscape of deformed and parallel realities.
As We May Think is presented as a kind of palimpsest and superposition of 12 poems by 12 poets from the 1920s, which reflected in some of their writings a time of change and a turning point in our society,
Wallace Stevens, T.S. Eliot, Robert Frost, Hart Crane, Nancy Cunard, Langston Huges, W.B. Yeast, Claude Mckay, William Carlos William, Marianne Moore, Wilfred Owen, and Ezra Pound.
In this way I intend to take the viewer into a confusing landscape in which, through words and fragments, the hesitation of where to look and the inability to read the full text, clouds the meaning and creates new combinations, with multiple interpretations and meanings. The texts, in a continuous Scroll Down and Zoom In, typical movements nowadays in how we consume all the information on devices, play with the spatial perceptions of the viewer.
It addresses the immense flow of information and is positioned in a critique of how we consume and manage such amount of information guided by experiences and fleeting perceptions, highlighting the difference between information and formation. I also explore the appropriation, manipulation and impersonation to which we are subject through digital media, information platforms and social networks.
We have to distinguish the voices from the echoes, in this clamour of crossed screams, because in the end, to be able to see we must know how to look and know what to look at.
Also seeks to expand information in the viewer, and tries to forms links of connection, and that those who do not know their authors or poems have the opportunity to immerse themselves in life and work of these great literati.
