2021
whatsapp bot
From the election of the far right to the pandemic, global information technology caused an unprecedented impact within the Brazilian context, modifying the social, political and economic space. Replicant takes this context as a starting point from which to reflect on the relationship between technology, politics, economy, space and perception. Through scenarios inspired by Brazil’s history and recent context, archival images from magazines from the 70s, a moment where the country experienced a huge cycle of nature exploitation under the dictatorship, the project addresses issues of extraction, its infrastructure, its impact on the environment, its relation to the body, and exhaustion, while, via poetic inserts, imagining possibilities of other forms of relation, based on the interdependence and regeneration. The project consists of a Whatsapp bot which replicates, responds and develops through the participant’s interactions. Following the medium’s logic of fragmentation, the piece is constituted as a literary and audiovisual collage which links different times and spaces, constructing situations in which the past and future coexist in the present. “Replicant” was developed as a project for the online platform www.aarea.co and 34th Sao Paulo Biennal.
