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WR3AD1NG D1GIT5

PROJECT TYPE

(DES)CONEXÃO: A DIGITAL ALCHEMY LAB


“The Stone can only be found when the search lies heavily on the searcher. – Thou seekest hard and findest not. Seek not and thou whilst find.”

Arthur Koestler, The Act of Creation

(DES)CONEXÃO is a cyber poetic artifact in Portuguese, developed in 2018 with the initial purpose of questioning the way in which human perception is mediated by digital technologies, increasingly limiting and disputing our attention. By making use of alchemical allegories, such as the metaphor of the philosophical stone, in order to put into perspective two apparently opposed experiences of time, that of the stone and of digital, both layered composites, (DES)CONEXÃO serves as a digital alchemy lab where different technologies are mixed together, exploring the plasticity and materiality of media themselves.

Inspired after writing and reading strategies once explored in alchemical treatises, in (Des) conexão, the reader is invited to unveil a series of - modified, filtered, sublimated, multiplied, and sometimes even self-generated - fragments, so that a potential de-codification can take place.


In its current online instantiation, and after several metamorphoses as an installation and exhibition, (DES)CONEXÃO now takes the shape of a circular interface made of 32 different contents divided into groups of 12 (representing 12 different alchemical processes) and distributed along 4 colors corresponding to the four traditional main stages of an alchemical operation.


Following a centripetal logic of navigation, from stone to flesh, each group of contents can be seen as conceptual fractals, each one of them being the result of a different creative process between all four coauthors.


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(DES)CONEXÃO: A DIGITAL ALCHEMY LAB

(DES)CONEXÃO: A DIGITAL ALCHEMY LAB

(DES)CONEXÃO: A DIGITAL ALCHEMY LAB