Transmutations: Aesthetic Explorations for the Subjective Significance of Signals and Data

Abstract

Our societies are characterized by an extreme datafication of people's experiences, with profound cultural and social implications. Interfaces use optimized patterns by creating a context in which signals, data and mediating devices standardize individual experiences. Like Zone X explorers, who must confront and adapt to transformed realities, contemporary individuals navigate a data landscape that constantly redefines their perceptions and experiences. This fictional space is a powerful metaphor for this process of datafication of the experience. From this, this article addresses the central ideas of the interdisciplinary Transmutations project, to be executed in 2024. It links data from various levels (personal, biological, cultural), which through transcoding strategies (data to image, sound, etc.), will serve to rehearse scenarios where the experience captured by the data intersects with the lived and subjective experience, the technological with the biological, the standardized with the unknown. In this way, the project stresses the experience of data by expanding its analytical complexity towards subjective, uncertain, fictitious scenarios that account for the profound transformations of the human experience in this current scenario.