We have never been modern is a work by dutch artists Lotte van den Berg and Daan ’t Sas and was presented at Oerol Festival in 2018. I was privileged to be part of this production in a very interesting way. The work, inspired by the work of Bruno Latour by the same name, outwardly does not have any residue of technology. The core of the work is a discussion and the creation of four images by the visitor assisted by the interviewers.

My task for this work was to create a seamless and non-distracting way for the interviewers to take notes, record the dialogue and create consistent images that were pre-processed for printing and publication. All of this data was also synchronized via the internet for instant analysis was well as publication both online and in print. It was a great challenge to crate an invisible technical tool that facilitated both the artwork and the research (the system also featured a way of meta tagging audio and text documents so they can be cross referenced and search easily). On top of this creating an intelligent photography system that would take perfect photos every time, no matter what the lighting conditions was another interesting challenge. The tool I made had to be invisible, and just work. The interviewers were not to be distracted by technical issues or the details of photography.

The work was a great success and the system I crated for collecting and preserving the experiences generated by the artwork was a great success.

The online outcome of the images can be seen here.