ARTISTIC STATEMENT – Black Hat

BLACK HAT is an audio interactive installation.

Here is a text written for this project in collaboration with the Bombay-based sound studio Aural Mayhem. Co-developed with Niraj Gera. Prototype available on request.

What if you enter a world, which you cannot get out of?

Who isn’t getting tired of every interaction with technology becoming a wrestling match for unfragmented focus? What happens when we have given away our attention to an entity which uses design tricks to keep us trapped? Internet is an attention-based economy. There is a war going on and the object of conquest is our awareness. In our daily journey from morning to night there is a hidden struggle between our minds and external forces. They win over our impulses, using neurological signals. Ads before videos, billboards, notifications, … we navigate through sollicitations to an extreme degree. What if we go through the recreation of some of the patterns that web designers and marketers use?

Because they mine your attention like milking a precious nectar, what happens when we experience the common interface of a smartphone soundscape (Whatsapp notifications, Skype ringtones…) in the form of a maze… The psychological tricks of the UX

design will help us to experience that everything on the internet is fighting for our attention. We want to make the visitors go through a journey of realizing the everyday’s tricks that UX designers pull on us. We intend to make the experience of an App spatialized where the body is the cursor. The user of a satire form is to make the visitors conscious in a gentle and funny way.

What’s actually taken away then? How to reclaim our connection to the here and now?