Client: Artechouse

Overview

Trust is a body of works that explores the multiple meanings and implications of the concept of trust. fuse* breaks down trust as it relates to three major societal institutions: finance, social media, and news sources. The exhibit analyzes historical events’ impact on society’s level of trust up to the present moment and considers how this relationship might evolve in the future. Trust has been created to give the audience an immersive experience to contemplate how the presence or absence of trust can shift the perception of our individual and shared realities. Interpersonal trust allows an individual to build a sense of collective trust. Likewise, a loss of one’s personal confidence in the system can lead to a collective loss of mutual trust. The installation focuses on the ability of trust as a complex force to modify our perception of reality. The experience is composed of three chapters (past, present and future) and is characterized by a succession of audiovisual atmospheres that evolve following the trend of trust over time.

Goals

The idea of the installation came to mind together with Artechouse just after the spread of pandemic, in order to create a collective reflection on topics such us human interdependencies, collective influence on the construction of society and a basis of financial analysis of the past and present reality we live in. Trust is an expansion on fuse*’s continued research in merging technology and the human experience to elicit empathy.

Additional Information

All the data have been reconstructed by interweaving financial data and the value of the Index of Consumer Sentiment (ICS) provided by the University of Michigan. The past, is composed by two visual layers, a comment on the capacity of the media’s ability to affect our view of reality. The first layer is created through the reprocessing of point clouds that range from macroscopic visions, such as urban environments, to the individual perspective, where human gestures represent the fundamental role of relationships in building individual trust. The present is designed to be visually composed of a series of moments impressed on a film. The negative images scroll together with 750,000 tweets selected from half million messages archived during the pandemic, starting in March 2020. All the selected tweets contain the word "trust" and have been categorized with a positive and negative label through a sentiment analysis algorithm. Finally, the future is composed of parallel timelines interacting together in different capacities, according to the predicted trust value and its evolution into the future. The potential trends are the result of a predictive analysis carried out through a recurrent neural network trained on the basis of the historical series of financial data.