The end of childhood (C:Hub audio arts and technologies)

C:Hub audio arts and technologies

Creator(s)/participant(s):
Angelos Floros, Assistant Professor (tenured), Department of Audio and Visual Arts, Ionian University

“The End of Childhood” is an original artistic project where it was implemented for the exhibition “Symbols and Iconic Ruins” of National Museum of Contemporary Art Athens of Greece (ΕΜΣΤ). The idea was based on the thematic of the curator Panayotis Pangalos, exploring the ways in which we perceive and approach cultural symbols over time, especially in Modern Times.

The work is consisted by two applications, the exhibition piece (the reader) and the website theendofchildhood.com (the writer). The exhibition piece acts as a documentary representative model of human behaviour with the website.

The website introduces a list of 80 key-points of Modern History, according to British Council list of “80 moments that shaped the world”, as they mention. The website visitor, using the symbols can approach each ‘moment’, to hear and read the related content. During the navigation, ‘cookies’ stores to a database the following metadata: selected items, active time on every selection. Those metadata store a non-iconic profile of human behaviour of the reader.

In the exhibition piece, an algorithm reads randomly each entry of the database and generates one ballon for every ‘symbol’ visit and it places the selected symbol as texture. The balloon remains on the sky as much time as the user spent on it. The text of the selected symbol is heard in the exhibition space along with the sounds of creation and destruction of the balloon.

The End of Childhood generates a meta-memorial of cultural memory of the Read and Write permissions (R/W) of human behaviour in the exhibition space along with the other exhibition pieces. The audio scape adds the Execute (E) permission as an augmented reality trace to visitors experience of the space.

Why “The End of Childhood”? Symbols and Historic Ruins help us to cultivate and grow our ideology and identity. Those data are important for our profile in order to form a cognitive model of our society. They make us mature, streaming us from childhood to adulthood and further to the next phase of our life. After childhood, we have all the necessary supplies to propose and generate new data important for the evolution of modern civilization detached of the burdens of the past and history.

The artistic project "The end of childhood" focuses the research on the relationship of citizens with the audio-visual information shaped by the electronic media, as received from mobile devices. In other words, the relationship between 'people' and their behaviour with audiovisual content that concerns their information.

The algorithm captures the behaviour of users with the content using not primarily data, but metadata generated during the browsing of the content. Metadata provides information about human behaviour forming an original record of users' relationship with digital information.

The research was presented at The Art and Design of XR Conference/Symposium, implemented at the National Gallery on September 23 and 24, 2022 by EKPA and STEGI Onassis Foundation.

The technical know-how for that artwork was developed through research in the Hub of Art Laboratories programme.