Indivisuals

Would you be prepared to make a free phone call from a public box, but on condition that everyone could listen to it?

Do you mind having your life made public when, for example, you use your cell phone?

Do you realise that thanks -in part- to technology we see reality through other people’s eyes?

Have you noticed that since you have had e-mail and a cell phone you work more, but you also feel more at ease and comfortable?

Do you see public space as if it were a stage, peopled by actors and actresses playing their own parts?

Questions of that kind are the ones the exhibition Indivisuals aims to ask the spectator. Nine artists think from different angles about how social perception is filtered by technology and the dominant techniques of socialisation. But without any elaborate devices, just subjecting our everyday social attitudes to a kind of experiment, to several experiments.

Indivisuals is not an exhibition of technology. Anyone looking for ’technophile fantasies of yesterday and today’ will not find them here. Thinking critically about the media and their real practices means forcing technologies to talk about issues and interests which go beyond them. In no case do the analyses proposed in Indivisuals spring from machines, they come from social reasoning which is later submitted to technological mediation. Things we know a lot about.

The technology we have is the result of the gradual disappearance of public space, the constant erosion of social commitment and the enormous social and political loneliness in which the modern individual lives. Technologies have been accused of isolating people and, through the comfort they offer, of keeping people at home or making them withdraw into themselves. However, technology has not produced that effect: technology is only the spectacle that makes that process fascinating. The ultimate reality is modern man’s urge to communicate with other people, to express himself. Deprived of channels of political, professional or social expression, of spaces for ’committed’ socialisation beyond the factory or the office and subjected to the constant bombardment of a common space, based solely on consumption and entertainment, the modern individual is obsessed with talking to other people.

The information and communication technologies (ICT) provide ideal places for that. Connecting is everything in present social discourse, because it creates common spaces. However, it does not create more binding communities. The ICT have become social space, attended by “indivisual” entities who communicate through screens, panes of glass, viewfinders, buttons, in pursuit of a solution to the reigning social void.

On the other hand, modern society has adopted mobility and portability as essential values. The introduction of portable ICT and the use people make of them show us the need to rethink what we consider “private” and “public”: by taking our privacy into the public space and the public space into our private world the classic boundaries and functions the capitalist individual had assigned to both categories become blurred.