“Concerto para Piano e Pandemia” by Nicolas Gomes
Title:
- Concerto para Piano e Pandemia
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Artist Statement:
Concerto para Piano e Pandemia (Concert for Piano and Pandemic) invites us to feel with our body what the world wide web is feeling right now about the pandemic, whilst reflecting on how the amount of data we are presented with every day affects us. Tweets are captured in real time by a python script that takes their characters and transforms them into musical notes in a piano sound. As the thousands – maybe millions – of tweets reach our ears, they pile up and mix sonically, creating an immersive soundscape that messes up our senses.
In this installation, we can let this algorithmic non-human robot search for information about COVID-19 across Twitter to help us understand it faster than we could previously. But finding the data is not the only thing that is needed to do. After the use of this search robot, we need to find a way to absorb the content of each tweet that gives us information about the subject; we need to try to understand it. And if the cognitive way is not fast enough, we can try to absorb it with our other senses, like hearing and feel-ing it physically. Our body can then try to understand the speed of incoming information and adjust our brains to it, in an unconscious way of dealing with such a terrifying new disease that affected our entire way of living, spreading fear among families.
As our information distribution channels became and remain congested with the influx of data regarding COVID-19, with this artwork I hope to find and present to the public a new way of absorbing information and knowledge about it, using our senses to feel the data instead of trying to make sense of it rationally.
