The moment when you stop looking for them by Itziar Barrio is a cross-media installation including film, VR, and robotic sculptures. The animation and VR components present a speculative fiction dialogue-turned-flirtation between the philosopher Plato (c. 428–423 BC, died 348/347 BC) and the mathematician Euclid (fl. 300 BC) on reality, representation and form. It deploys Unity, Blender and other digital tools to explore materiality and physics with rendered objects. Original footage of Plato’s Academy in Athens, Orpheus’ cave in Lesbos, and the Aegean sea are mixed with a collaborative text generated using large language models and different materialities of corporate and non-corporate algorithms. Flushing, one of the robotic sculptures, is a choreography of materials, motors and inflation-disinflation movements using Arduino, concrete and oil slicks of Spandex. The moment when you stop looking for them reflects on our current state of technological “becoming” from a human de-centering point of view, and on how the past connects with the future.
Algorithms these days are everywhere- shaping our realities, jobs, and relationships. The moment when you stop looking for them is part of the new long term multimedia project by Itziar Barrio exploring the origin of algorithms and their influence on western logic, alongside poetry as a model of dissent.
