A Smartphone in a Human Hand
by Defne Ayas
“The South-South exchanges are exploding, and in particular on the technological front, from Southern China to India to South America and Africa, they are also creating a collective consciousness“, says artist Emo de Medeiros. “Bear in mind that the Global South is 75% of the world’s population, even though it has access to one-fifth of the world income,” he adds. “Plus a smartphone in a human hand means the access to millions of books.” As such, last year de Medeiros jumpstarted his active research, Handroid City, focusing on digital acceleration and democratization of technology in the Global South.
Convinced that the Digital Revolution with its ubiquitous use of AR and VR, robotics, artificial intelligence, and genetic engineering, wherein humans are creating tools that create tools like the algorithms that design circuits in computer processors, is instigating a different world order (not unlike the Printing Revolution), especially a multipolar one that is penetrating and transforming every aspect of human life on the planet, he delves into research areas ranging from medical technology to education to agriculture, as well as from family relationships to commercial exchanges.
As such, in this particular work, de Medeiros looks at how human relationships are being recalibrated, accelerated, and dematerialized but also intensified by the use of cell phones — be it in social networks, intimate, interpersonal, and work-based relationships. Taking his inspiration from the current situation now in Cotonou, Benin’s economic capital, where every single person now owns a cell phone, he compares it to a decade ago, when a bribe was the only way to obtain a landline, let alone mobiles phones, which were only accessible to the privileged people. He set out to analyse site-specific case studies in everyday life in Benin, as well as what happened across the Global South, where the large proportion of the current generation is made of digital natives. For example, take aspects of leapfrogging: when the technological leaps that occurred in the Global South allowed the country to switch directly to more advanced technologies, without having to go through intermediate technological stages that the European countries had to go through. Or, that of adaptation as fast-growing phone brands in Africa have developed smartphones with cameras and visual algorithms adapted to darker skin tones and bass-oriented sound systems.
Whether it is in the form of algorithmic non-linear editing of his videos, which allows him to work with tools and effects such as randomness, echo, collision, and causality; or applying digital texture and transformations to his image in real-time such as zooming, edge-detection or pixelization, or working AI-assisted composition of electronic music and synthetic sounds, de Medeiros is keen on exploring the expanded spectrum of artistic possibilities that come with technological evolution in his transnational Handroid City.
In the work, he also makes a special attempt to capture the immaterial aspects of this tactile embodiment of digital augmentation in people’s everyday life. One can easily notice this in his film, especially in his number of close-up shots of hands (with a reference to Harun Farocki’s The Expression of Hands) and his interest in the specific transcultural gestuality to the use of cell phones. The idea of working with digital districts as a decentralized, dematerialized, transnational, and transcultural city with inhabitants speaking the same language — a sort of neo-Babel spreading horizontally instead of vertically — united by the use of the hand, came to him for instance, while filming in Nigeria. One person he interviewed in Lagos told him, “[one’s] hand feels incomplete without a smartphone.” This mix of the hand as both tactile and haptic when aligned with digital technology gives the work its title, confirmation of a formation of a new global human language that simultaneously extends to machines, based on a particular manner of combining 0s and 1s in bits and bytes.
About the author
Defne Ayas is currently the curator-at-large at the VAC Foundation in Moscow as well as Artistic Director of the Gwangju Biennale in South Korea in 2020.
