12 Years

12 Years:

Or how we learned to simulate feelings, until we can hardly tell when we don’t. Numbers, graphs and statistics as standards for better reporting data, quantifiable and cross-matched within recognizable patterns, stereotypes, and even collective emotional states. Nothing can be alien to us again. We are all success stories, otherwise we would remain untold. In the uncanny valley of crypto bliss and covid charts, no next pandemic will catch us unprepared, unready to speculate economically from the self-confinement of our netflix screens. If not for our time, do we perhaps care more about our money? Or maybe we have awakened a primal predatory instinct: invest, produce, ensure a passive income, and thus the survival of the time/health/love-is-money world we had built for us. We and us, that is, a we and an us written with the use of algorithms developed for the western dream of the selfmade man.

Written in the style of a bad commercial, the work covers 12 years from the life of a fictional character faced with the hard question: what would you give up for an unimaginable cryptofortune? Its last couple of minutes, documenting the grim east-european terrain where the action takes place, turns the title upside down and offers a possible finale: numbers numb.