The Revolt of Replicas

2020

The revolt of replicas is an installation that explores how spatiality and temporality are affected when real life events are mediated by digital platforms such as Instagram. Smartphones, the social media support, become a window where the world we have accepted to be true gets rendered infinitely and repetitively. Through the device’s screen we are able to scroll down an endless concatenation of events that are taking place anywhere and at any given time, but when represented in front of us, they compose a new version of reality, one that is conveniently at our fingertips.

The intensive use of mobile devices has reshaped how we perceive and interact with the world around us. The stream of information mediatized by the phone keeps us so engaged, that sometimes it might feel like the spaces we inhabit dematerialize and the passing of time stretches and contracts. The revolt of replicas attempts to represent this feeling of losing our sense of space and time when engaging obsessively with online content.

The installation consists in a dark room with one phone in the center that displays an Instagram feed showing the events that occurred in Chile between October 18th, 2019 to January 1st, 2020. At each side of the room, big scale replicas of two monuments that have played a symbolic role during the revolt are projected. Using the scrolling feed as an interface, these historic monuments –depicted by photogrammetric 3D models– become simulations of reality that bend as if they were being pulled by a massive gravity force.