MEMEMEME
Radamés Ajna & Thiago Hersan (BR)
This project started with the suspicion that phones are having more fun communicating than we are. Every message is a tickle, every swipe a little rub.
From their initial transformation of metal and silicon into objects of desire, infused with social significance and ‘intelligence’, personalised with biases and ideology, endowed with a flawless memory, always a call away from the mothership... it becomes difficult to declare who — phone or human — has the more complex cultural heritage.
memememe is a sculpture that celebrates the ambiguities of human/object, user/interface and actor/network relationships. It is an app that removes phones from their anthropocentric usefulness, and gives them the beginnings of a language. Residues of their conversations can be seen, but certainly not understood.
PROFILE
Thiago Hersan used to design circuits and semiconductor manufacturing technologies. Now, he is more interested in exploring non-traditional uses of technology and their cultural effects. He has participated in residencies at Impakt in Utrecht, Hangar in Barcelona, and The Hacktory in Philadelphia. He has worked at a robotic toy design studio in San Francisco, and along with Radamés Ajna, helped start FACTLab in Liverpool in 2015.
Radamés Ajna is a Liverpool-based Brazilian media artist and educator with a background in physics, mathematics and computation.
He has been using technology as a platform for experimentation with public spaces, human interaction and machine interaction. He has presented and taught in different museums, art centres and festivals around the world, including Tate Liverpool; Electronic Language International Festival (FILE), São Paolo; Museu da Imagem e do Som (MIS), São Paulo; Semibreve Festival, Portugal; and Media Art Futures in Spain. In 2015, Radamés was awarded an artist residency at Autodesk and was the recipient of an Art and Artificial (VIDA) 15.0 Production Incentive award from Fundación Telefónica. Currently, he is a researcher artist-in-residence at FACT Liverpool, helping the development of FACTLab.