Angelos Floros

Exhibited: Symbols and Iconic Ruins, curated by Panayotis Pangalos, National Museum of Contemporary Art (EMST), Athens, May 27 – August 20, 2021

Exhibited: Athens Digital Arts Festival — ADAF Online, September 15 – October 15, 2022

Presented: ERASMUS XR — The Art and Design of XR Symposium, National Gallery, Athens, September 23, 2022, link

In computing, a file carries three permissions: read, write, execute. They were invented to separate us — are you a reader, or an editor? The rights are different, and the distinction has survived intact into the digital age, governing how each of us is allowed to touch data.

The End of Childhood applies those three permissions to cultural memory.

The work has two halves. The first is a mobile website — the reader. It holds eighty moments that shaped the modern world, taken from the British Council's list: historical events, technological achievements, scientific discoveries, people whose work changed the identity of human civilization. Each moment is reached through a symbol. Visitors move through them by touch, hearing and reading what each one holds.

While they read, the site is writing. Cookies record a unique identifier for each visitor, which symbols they chose, and how long they stayed with each one. No image of the person is kept — only a non-iconic profile of behaviour, which answers three questions: how do we interface with content, how much time do we give it, and how deep or superficial is our approach to it.

This is not an invention of the work. It is what advertising does every day, across commerce, politics, ideology, music, entertainment — building an anthropo-geographical map of human behaviour. The map is unusually complete, because it records both the signified and the signifier: not only what we chose, but the method by which we chose it.

The second half is the exhibition piece — the author. An algorithm reads the database at random and releases one balloon into the sky for every symbol a visitor opened, with that symbol printed on its surface. The balloon stays aloft exactly as long as the reader stayed with it. The text of the symbol is heard in the room, together with the sounds of the balloon being made and destroyed.

So the gallery holds read and write. The audio adds the third permission — execute — as an augmented trace laid over the visitors' experience of the space, and the work becomes a meta-memorial of cultural memory: not the eighty moments themselves, but the record of how strangers moved through them.

Why the end of childhood? Symbols and historic ruins are what we use to build an ideology and an identity; they are the data from which a society forms a cognitive model of itself. They make us mature. And after childhood, we have everything we need to generate new data of our own — detached, at last, from the burdens of the past and of history.