Jumbo love Replaying Beaucoup Fish

By Malena Paz Del Zotto

Topic: Personal Data

Medium: Object

Material: Vinyl fabric

Institute: Politecnico di Milano

Year: a.a. 2023-2024

What would happen if each minute of music played on streaming occupied a piece of physical space, like analogue records used to? The result indicates that, when something becomes too expansive, all-encompassing, it becomes inconvenient and excessive beyond what is needed. The habit of listening to my favorite house album in the background takes on a grotesque, sizeable shape when it translates into centimeters the minutes spent replaying it over the past year. By transcribing the information into a physical object, we are able to see the weight of it in our lives and become conscious of the sheer pervasiveness of content consumption available at our fingertips.

Featured image of the project Jumbo love Replaying Beaucoup Fish

Complementary image of the project Jumbo love Replaying Beaucoup Fish

Metaphor used:

Size and weight as a metaphor for rendering the invisible visible. The metaphor transforms something that is only loosely measured (time) into something visual and straightforward. By rendering the extent of the habit obvious by showing the enlarged object, it is turning it into something unmistakable and imposing, it is extracted from the meaninglessness of the background of the digital world and brought to the foreground of the physical world. The format of the soft sculpture can also help convey the idea that time is a malleable and fleeting thing. The liquid or weak aspect of the object aims to represent the thoughtlessness in which time is spent when listening to music through media streaming services.

Intended Meaning:

Digital formats are always updating and expanding, yet their influential presence remains small, imperceptible, almost invisible behind the devices that harness them. Analogue formats, on the other hand, are always vulnerable to degradation. They are limited, yet the space they occupy is significant, they are tactile and visible, as well as meaningful to those who own them. By granting physicality to a habit in the form of an absurd and contradictory representation, the user’s own behaviours and the value of music (as well as that of the artists behind it) are put into question. Music takes time and work, and digital formats take away that by rendering it a simple file, a button on the phone or PC. This representation also aims to touch at the vulnerability of artists’ work when they are placed within the volatile algorithmic system of contemporary streaming services.

Source:

Track replays on Spotify (from December 2022 to October 2023): focusing particularly on one of my favorite albums.