CODING ALPHABET



Utrecht 2020



Mirroring ourselves in our portable devices and modeling our faces, to obtain an image that meets our standards of beauty, is no longer enough for us. Even those filters that hid the "imperfections" are not sufficient to calm our desire for identification. Now there are programs that, thanks to a couple of commands, totally distort our portraits, transforming them into something completely different and fictitious. Although the transformation is clear, I believe that many people will come to identify themselves with these digital avatars, because we have gradually arrived at this absurd metamorphosis of the idea of ​​"I".

The old selfie (it is already old and not because of Bayard) deformed our faces due to the wide-angle lenses installed in smartphones, a deformation that seems not to have bothered those users unaware of the good use of photographic optics. Then it was the turn of the retouching in post-production, to remove wrinkles and hide small defects. It took very little to learn to read those disfigured images because we know it well that it is our brain that adapts to the vision and that perception is only the result of coding.

Each of us, from birth, is committed to recognizing faces. When we reach maturity, we know how to discern with sophisticated precision, and over a fraction of a second, the expressive differences of a face. Reading these expressions is probably the most refine ability of the man using his sight, and this skill we apply to our personal research and idealization of the portrait that identifies us and with which we engage our virtual relationships.

The fierce criticism we make of those photos that don't meet our expectations is a really interesting behavioral trait. I am not interested in analyzing the psychological aspect of this behavior to which, some more or less, we all fall for, but it is fascinating to understand how we came to this type of criticism, which also existed at the time of the gelatine silver process, but which in recent years it has taken on worrying levels, so much so that if you dare to tag a person on a social network without his consent, you can get in trouble.

IT overload is primarily an overload of photographic information. The contents of images and videos are multiplying on the internet at a glance, while we read less and less. Our increasingly intense and persistent visual experiences are making us super sensitive to sight, neglecting the other four senses. We know absolutely everything about how things should look and we believe that things are really how they look. But as said before, perception is only the result of coding, and the alphabet of this coding is almost completely unknown to us.

I believe that gradually, just as happened with the first selfies taken with smartphones, we will move on to identify ourselves in these new images that today seem only a frivolous game, but which, slowly, are already updating the mysterious coding alphabet.

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