Watch Your Bubble

How much does your SELF depend on others? To what extent is the bubble surrounding you shaping WHO YOU ARE?

This project is an interdisciplinary art exhibition & conference devoted to the problem of Bubbles and the illusory yet tangible phenomena of self identity. We intend to merge the borders between philosophy, social psychology, neuroscience, and aesthetics, converging on multiple art disciplines.

The project Bubbles explores the building up of the social and personal identity, as a constitutive process in living beings, as a process of demarcation and delimitation across groups, as a blurred and flittering complex phenomenon. Identities and the self, yet historically, culturally and socially determined, can be conceived as unstable, emerging and constantly changing, as physically instantiated processes. In virtual space we blend the features of our identity into an ostensible coherent matter. But what is coherence?

The looking glass self is a mirror of the society, and yet it constitutes society. As the identity assimilates to the bubble, the bubble becomes the identity. Its weakness makes up its power. Although caught up in the anonymity of the bubble, as one among many, the individual self can be the tipping point for the holistic identity to emerge. And yet, it will never be able to break out of this bubble.

Bubbles invite an exploration of the ubiquitous, constructed, immeasurable and fortuitousness nature of identity, uncovering its unconscious/intangible quality. With this project we discover the dynamic nature of the interplay of social and individual identity. Focusing on the transparent and illusory, yet tangible and dividing quality they have.

Bubbles takes inspiration from diverse contemporary social phenomena, derived from digitalization, migration, globalization, truncated trans-culturization and hypermodern societies. In which spatial segregation of diverse social groups, whom living in the same physical space, but without relating to each other, conform to different and parallel layers or realities and virtualities. Bubbles also is based on recent discussions about social bubbles, the isolation and separation of groups according to their preferences, but also across languages, habits, style, personality among others. The bubble metaphor applies to the ever growing atomization of our societies, where individuals relate less and less with others through enacted ‘real’ interpersonal relations, relying more and more on mediated forms of digital interaction (e.g. social networks). All these play a central role organizing society as bubbles within bubbles or layers within a system.

Bubbles challenges our most basic assumptions about who we are, our beliefs and how our identity, desires, fears and hopes are ‘just’ built up from our social and physical context. We intend to highlight how we innocently “hold” to our beliefs and identities as being something definitive and factual. With Bubbles we will explore an interdisciplinary and interactive debate on this very process of identity, as social and individual phenomena. The art exhibition will be composed of several artworks, ranging from installations, paintings to video, performance, etc. Talks with artists and experts will present theoretical perspectives and cutting edge research by leading scientists from diverse disciplines. By means of workshops, screening program and dialogues, artists and scientists will invite the viewer to join a collective reflection about the topic.