Angelos Floros

Presented: Symposium “The art and design of XR”, National Kapodestrian University of Athens / Onassis STEGI, National Gallery, Athens, September 23-24, 2022, link

The End of Childhood is an original artistic project where it was implemented for the exhibition “Symbols and Iconic Ruins’ curated by Panayotis Pangalos. The exhibition hosted from May 27 up to October 24 of 2021 at the National Museum of Contemporary Art, in greek known as EMST. The thematic of the exhibition gave to participants the motive to deal with the universal role of symbols in human civilization.

The project consists of two applications, the website (the reader) and the exhibition piece (the author). The terms reader and writer have been around since the early days of computers as a basic method of separating us. Are you a reader? Are you an editor? Rights are different. Roles also remain distinct in the early digital age in how we interact with data and information. 

The idea, started, exploring ways in which people perceive and approach symbols as a communication language. In modern times the visual information becomes the most popular and sufficient method to transfer messages to general public. Symbols since the prehistoric years are not carriers of content, but traces of key-elements of our history.

A mobile friendly website has been created. The website presents a list of 80 key points in Modern History, according to the British Council's list of "80 moments that shaped the world", as they say. The 80 points are about pivotal moments that changed the course of modern history. Other similar lists of smaller size can be found on the internet, but with minimal differences. The list includes historical events, technological achievements, scientific discoveries and people with work of global scope that significantly influenced the current identity of human civilization.

The website visitor, using the symbols can approach each moment, to hear and read the related content. During the navigation, cookies stores to a database the following metadata: a) unique id for each user, b) selected items, c) active time on every selection. Those metadata store a non-iconic profile of human behaviour of the reader, giving answers to the following questions:

 How we interface with content. In our case the content was about the cultural history of the civilisation.

 How much time do we spent?

 How deep or superficial is our approach to information?

We know data as the alphanumeric value of a phenomenon, subject or object. Information is the designed meaning using specific data. Metadata is widely used by advertising companies as an anthropo-geographical map of  human behaviour in our interaction with digital information. It spans a multitude of

fields, such as commerce, politics, ideology, music, information, entertainment, etc. The range is huge because it concerns both the signified and the signifier, giving data both about their preferences and about the method you follow during the selection phase. Metadata is a reliable map of human behaviour in XR environments 

The exhibition piece acts as a documentary representative model of human behaviour with the website. In the exhibition piece, an algorithm reads randomly each entry of the database and generates one ballon for every symbol visit and it places the selected symbol as texture. The balloon remains on the sky as much time as the user spent on it. The text of the selected symbol is heard in the exhibition space along with the sounds of creation and destruction of the balloon.

The End of Childhood generates a meta-memorial of cultural memory of the Read and Write permissions (R/W) of human behaviour in the exhibition space along with the other exhibition pieces. The audio scape adds the Execute (E) permission as an augmented reality trace to visitors experience of the space.

Why “The End of Childhood”? Symbols and Historic Ruins help us to cultivate and grow our ideology and identity. Those data are important for our profile in order to form a cognitive model of our society. They make us mature, streaming us from childhood to adulthood and further to the next phase of our life. After childhood, we have all the necessary supplies to propose and generate new data important for the evolution of modern civilization detached from the burdens of the past and history.