Daniel Armengol Altayó / #artificialselfie

As part of The Art of Bots showcase, Daniel Armengol Altayó presented #artificialselfie.

Project Intro:

#artificialselfie is a mechanical device that holds a smartphone in its ‘arm’, repeatedly takes selfies of itself and then shares them on Instagram.

As smart devices and social networks entered our lives, hyper-connectivity has made our world move faster than ever with technology shaping the way we relate to other human beings, creating new languages and shaping our behaviours through small gestures and everyday habits.

The selfie phenomenon is a clear example of a gesture that every internet social being has adopted due to the mobile devices and social media’s way of working, and its impact on society has been extremely high. On one hand, as we all seem to repeat the same behaviours with a given technology, we ourselves start acting as predictable machines. On the other hand, we teach machines to understand us, giving them the ability to replicate gestures and habits in a surprisingly human way.

A selfie is a paradigmatic way to prove to the contemporary world that one exists – it is both a statement of some profound need to express oneself, and something that is indistinguishable from new modes of interaction proper to the social media aesthetics.

The selfie has become a (un)human necessity. Selfie ergo sum.

Artist Bio:

Daniel Armengol Altayó is an artist and designer based in Barcelona, working in the interaction between people
and technology, by exploring their relationships and paradigms, focused mainly on how people use technology to connect —and enhance these new connections—with other human beings. His work has been exhibited at MoMA, Contemporary Arts Center, China Millennium Monument Museum of Digital Arts and recently, The Aram Gallery.