Bego M Santiago – „FOLLOW THE PATH“

 

FOLLOW THE PATH is a Video installation where a small swimmers crowd is projected over water. The crowd pass from chaotic movements to complex network structure. The artwork explores the trigger between individuals and collective behaviors and how emotional contagion, as mood swing, created our social networks.

A civilization involves fixed rules, discipline, a passing from the instinctive to the rational state. When the social structure breaks the mass movements generate new social forms in and eternal circle of creative destruction. By the mere fact integrated into a crowd , the individual can have a extreme or rapid change in mood. There is emotional contagion or imitation, a kind of underground communication. This underground communication explain by Richard Dawkins' in 1976 as a meme, "an idea, behavior, or style that spreads from person to person within a culture". A meme acts as a unit for carrying cultural ideas, symbols, or practices that can be transmitted from one mind to another through writing, speech, gestures, rituals, or other imitable phenomena with a mimicked theme.

The mass is not so much a reality but a projection or social program, a form of that society to project the future under the idea of mass. A mood swing in the mass can play an important part in promoting problem solving and in producing flexible forward planning. As the Memes, Mass Moods that replicate most effectively enjoy more success, and some may replicate effectively even when they prove to be detrimental to the welfare of their hosts.

 

Wann: 04.- 06.11.2016

Wo: GlogauAIR

Wer nochmal: Bego M. Santiago