2023
Project aimed at creating emotions on demand.
I fear that we have become apathetic and standardized beings, perhaps even lacking the courage to feel our own emotions. At the intersection of art and dystopia, I have developed a system that would seem straight out of the darkest science fiction scenarios. Imagine a world where we simply click on buttons to delegate our capacity to feel: this is what my emotion farm offers. There we fulfill people’s emotional requests, producing feelings on command for them. The observation is terrifying, even chilling
Arsen Eca
In a society increasingly dominated by the immediacy and effectiveness of “click to get”, the artist Eca offers a deep and ironic reflection on our relationship to emotions. It offers the possibility of producing emotions by substitution, like an on-demand service.
The process is simple and in tune with our times: a user selects a specific emotion – be it anger, sleep, glory, joy, sadness or any other emotion. This choice is materialized by a click, which is in fact an act of purchase via the Tezos blockchain of an NFT (Non-fungible token) representing an “emergency coupon”. In doing so, Arseneca then expresses the chosen emotion in place of the buyer, the purchase of the NFT acting as a sort of mandate authorizing the artist to experience and express this emotion.
In his societal critique, Eca points out a disconcerting reality of our time: we have become elements – cells – of a complex system, where our behaviors, our thoughts, and even our emotions are often reduced to stereotypes, predictable and exploitable. Emotions, which were once intimate, deep and intrinsically human experiences, are now on the verge of becoming marketable commodities and delegable acts, thus gradually emptying their original substance.
Beyond the simple delegation of emotions, his work is an invitation to question our place within the system, to resist the homogenization of our experiences and to claim our uniqueness in the face of stereotypes. Through this subtle and provocative work, Eca invites us to question these concepts, inviting us to introspect on our relationship to the digital world and the value we place on our emotions.
