Due to the current social and health constraints, the Processing Community Day Porto 2021 (PCD21@Porto) exhibition conceived as an online event. Its theme, Future Vision, came from the necessity of reflecting on a context where our relations have been increasingly mediated by digital screens. Hence, we are constantly seeing each other through computer cameras, or “computational eyes”.
Considering the omnipresence state of computation, we invited the creative community to explore complex questions that emerge from such context: What possible forms or types of visions does the code point to? How can we manipulate or perhaps take advantage of these ways of seeing to speculate about alternative ways of seeing?
In this online exhibition you will find 21 works – or in better words, 21 future visions – coming from artists, designers, researchers, professionals, and students who explore those questions from a critical and creative perspective.
Such a constellation of visions inspires us to reflect on how technoculture has been influencing our feelings, behaviors and social relationships (Alexandre Andrada; Ningli Zhu) through data, categorization and surveillance that are implicit to that culture. Also, to expand our perception of nature (Alina Ling; Rodrigo Carvalho) and environment (Corneel Cannaerts) in a condition where our experiences are increasingly oriented by interfaces, digital mechanics and virtual spaces (Liyu Xue; Mariana Simões).
At the same time that they expand our vision towards possible spaces in which the human imaginary (Ani Dalal) collides with the media imaginary (The Current Team), they also invite us to speculate about nonhuman entities that can gain personality, produce discourses (Tivon Rice), and lead us to peculiar and unknown pathways (Céline Wassmer). In this sense, the works selected for this exhibition reinforce the need for critical thinking and awareness about the social, economic, ecological, and scientific impacts of computation, as well as a claim for the development of coding literacy (Tim Rodenbröker).
In times where issues from artificial intelligence and machinic vision give rise to perspectives decentered from humans (Joanna Zylinska), they bring visibility to aesthetics, languages and designs resulting from the creative symbiosis between humans and nonhuman agents (Ciphrd; Nuno Ferreira; Jéssica Pereira; José Rebelo, Sérgio Rebelo, Artur Rebelo). This also led to ludic systems (Erick Vermot and Chico Toledo; Jia-Rey Chang; Júnior Yuki Morimoto) that invite our senses to get involved in image experiences and, why not, to shape the image itself (Cátia Roça and Filipe Amaral).
Far from exhausting the notion of Future Vision, the works selected for the PCD21 Exhibition give us ideas on how code is used to question the technological mediations and the language itself. By doing that, they also invite us to speculate about possible and desired futures.