SOUND OBSESSED
1. Albert.DATA
Slowly Fading into “SUICIDE”
BACKGROUND/CONTEXT:
‘Slowly Fading into Data’ is a speculative audiovisual project expressed in multiple artistic formats: a retro-game & arcade installation, a conceptual music album, a live a/v performance, and an experimental film. These audiovisual experiences are the results from Albert.DATA’s artistic research on disembodiment, extended cognition, hybrid beings, and synthetic identities. An avant-garde, ambient, and contemplative story of a human, slowly mutating into data: A transformative journey about non-human forms, the boundaries and extensions of experience, existence, and identity. The creation of new audiovisual instruments to interpret the last human reverberations. A step forward for the disintegration of the self.
THE PROJECT:
Slowly Fading into ‘SUICIDE’is an experimental and artistic data sonification and visualization of Spain’s last 20 years of SUICIDE RATES. A project premièring the “Slowly Fading into Data – The Neural Net” (in collaboration with Neutone): an Artificial Intelligence audio model capable of synthesizing reality into 8-bit noise.
We performed an statistical analysis on the trends in age-standardized suicide rates in Europe (and in Spain) over the last 5 years, compared to the overall trend on the last 20 years.
- Overall Trend: The negative slope indicates a significant decline in suicide rates over the entire period. The very low p-value suggests this trend is statistically significant. Conclusion: The decline in suicide rates is statistically significant.
- Last 5 Years Trend: The negative slope suggests a decline, but the p-value is higher (0.077), which is above the conventional threshold for statistical significance (0.05). This means that while there is a decline, it is not statistically significant at the 5% level. Conclusion: The decline is less pronounced and not statistically significant, suggesting that the recent trend might not be as robust.
While the long-term trend shows a decrease in suicide rates across European countries, the most recent years indicate a potential change in direction or stabilization, warranting closer attention to recent developments and potential contributing factors.
ARTIST BIO:
Albert.DATA is the new artistic-synthetic identity of Albert Barque-Duran, PhD (1989). Albert is an artist and a researcher coordinating the ‘Master of Science in Digital Arts & Creative Technologies’ based at the ’IASlab (Interactive Arts & Science Laboratory)’ at ‘La Salle Campus Barcelona - Universitat Ramon Llull’ (CAT/ES).
Albert earned a PhD and a Postdoc in Cognitive Science from the ‘Centre for Mathematical Neuroscience’ at City, University of London (UK) and have been a Visiting Postgraduate Researcher at Harvard University (USA) and University of Oxford (UK). Albert’s artistic research focuses on: (1) human-algorithm interactions during artistic and creative processes; (2) perception and aesthetics under synthetic intelligence; and (3) the long-term implications of machine intelligence for the arts, science and philosophy.
They have exhibited and performed at the most significant and international new media art, experimental festivals, contemporary art museums and biennales (Sónar, MUTEK, Ars Electronica, Gray Area, V_2, ZKM Karlsruhe, Media Lab, etc). Albert received an award from "We Are Europe" (Creative Europe Programme of the European Union), which endowed him as one of the most impactful "Culture Activists" in Europe. Recently, has been nominated and short-listed for the ‘FUTURES’ category of the LUMEN Prize Award, and received the ‘Re: Humanism - Romaeuropa Digitalive’ Prize. Further, they have been internationally awarded by the "Art of Neuroscience" award for bridging science and art, and by the Catalan Government with the "International Award City of Lleida" for the significant cultural impact of their projects.