Unface Book
Contributors to Unface Book's first analogical edition: Carmen Álvarez, Elena Álvarez, Paula V. Álvarez, Nick Axel, Lucile Bernard, Ilaria Bernardi, Ángel Borrego Cubero, Brendan Cormier, Víctor Castillo, Maria Bruna Fabrizzi, Daniel Fernández, Mateo Fernández-Muro, Luis Gallego, Francisco García, Jordi Guerrero, Alain Guilleaux, Evangelina Guerra, Andrew Kovacks, Ted Landrum, Fosco Lucareli, Joanna Merwert, Fernando Nieto, Katerina Psegiannaki, El Mahdi Rezoug, Juan Antonio Sánchez, Amelia Vilaplana.
Unface Book unfolds inside an album of 'Photos of You', as a collection of intertwined thoughts exploring a given topic. An unwanted layer of meaning and utility is added to Facebook, so as to suggest deviant and dissonant uses, still supported by Facebook technologies.
The topic: Unface Book's content explores the meaning of design as part of the poetics and politics of being-in-space, beyond distinctions between physical, mental, digital, material or social space. Authors are invited to reflect on design elements such as walls, windows or doors, or qualities such as transparency, confinement, or opening, which are familiar to both architectural and digital interfaces (like Facebook itself). As a result, an interplay of ambivalent meaning is always open.
The protocol: Every contributor associates an image and a quote from different authors under a tittle that expresses its relation. Every new micro-editions is related to the precedent material, so that an on-going conversation stems from the process. To take part send me a quote + an image + a title, or just post them in your own Facebook wall and tagg "Unface Book project".
Concerns: Unface Book helps visualize the crossover nature of intellectual property, the limitations of the legal definition of authorship, and its link with the individualistic culture that collective hyperconnection masquerades. Ultimately, Unface Book seeks to test the possibility to overflow confinement and individuality through intersubjective constructs.
The ongoing book can be accesed here.
For the biennial, I selected 25 contributions from the ongoing book in Facebook and transformed them into a wall of postcards available for visitors to pick, collect, comment or send. Visitors were also invited to use the postcards to send their thoughts to the authors. The installation explored intersubjective concerns between contributions through a collection of augmented reality “stories” based in the connections made by the authors and a selection of keywords they picked.
The postcard-wall was a physical and material echoe of the experience of browsing through digital information. However it seeked to dilate the time of mental attention usually dedicated to explore information, and to slow down the accelerated pace that characterizes digital reading habits. I carefully calculated the scale of every element in the installation to get the visitors inmersed in a cloud of thoughts, images and voices while they literally walked around the piece. The space of communication and the space of exhibition merged into the new momentary spatial realm generated in the subjective experience of physically and mentally exploring, composing and reconstructing the major narrative that could be hinted across the exposed contributions.