Time. In Patrick Romeo’s “Emoji Hourglass”, it cycles through algebraic concepts, computer programming, and the Facebook thumbs up. The thumb sparkles, shoots, then multiplies, and eventually piles up, only to become all the keys on the keyboard.
In some ways, this seems to evoke the tragedy of the commons—we’re all acting independently of one another, in our own self-interest, exploiting a shared resource to the extent that demand overwhelms supply. Attention? Power sources? Pick and choose your economic measure. We generate these self-expressions using the same interfaces, and the intent behind those gestures become short-hand for approval, care, liking. Your ego counts the number of “likes”—we want all of our shared experiences to be applauded, but most importantly, acknowledged.
Time passes. How many times did you check your phone in the past hour? Were you disappointed that your witty quip wasn’t re-tweeted, your GIF wasn’t re-blogged? The sand clock trickles in real life, but in this GIF, it’s a choppy, frame-by-frame drop, followed by a long delay, and then a single Instagram tapped heart. The delay is visualized as white silence, the space between the stop and start of this loop. It signals an absence of some kind—an understanding of recognizing how we got here, and in recognizing, acknowledging we lived in a past that was just algebraic concepts and computer programming. Who even remembers their first Facebook thumbs up? I know I don’t.
Romeo’s “Emoji Hourglass”, alongside other works from his Sound Solutions series, is part of Call.io.pe, a Wrong – New Digital Art Biennale. pavilion curated by Morehshin Allahyari.
Comments on this entry are closed.