What emotions are we hiding when using the smartphone?

"The smartphone’s home is the house that we ourselves built through chosen and arranged applications. The background is the scenography of both front door and interior walls. Contacts are the inhabitants. Notifications are the world outside the house. This ecosystem appears limited and limiting because within it, there is a network of various suspended realities, fragments of organic life that we have chosen to freeze in time. Unlike organic reality, where time and space deteriorate and identity evolves, the virtual world accumulates and resists infinitely as long as it is not deleted. Inside the smartphone, the feeling of loss may not exist. Everything is salvageable, everything is retrievable if conditions allow. The continuous availability of the means enables us to be continuously collecting personal information. One can always produce and consume without significant limits.

This is a one portrayal of the smartphone. 

What is presence today? 

What is my smartphone to me?"

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This research aims in understanding what kind of relationships we have with our smartphones and how we depend on them beyond their functionality. Following a deep analysis of the device itself from a philosophical understanding, the research has encountered neurological and psychological studies to better understand the mechanisms of such dependency. Although the smartphone addiction is not yet recognised as such in the Diagnostic and Statistical Manual of Mental Disorders (DSM), studies show the reason why yet one more time we find our smartphones in our hands. 

Different kinds of artistic products have been created to communicate the theme in a funnier and more interactive way so that each can reflect and introspect. The works part of this nomadic series are "Free Time with BFF", "Letters to Iphone 7" and the performance "SOS in search of connection". The communication of the theme extends itself also through the workshop "W1_SMARTPHONE & ME" and the website "A Blog of a Smartphone".

During "W1_SMARTPHONE & ME", the 1st workshop of a future series, participants have been given the space to think and observe their relationship with the device with given step-by-step exercises.

The aim is to question the relationship we have with our smartphone in order to start building an active and healthier connection with our surrounding, and with individual and social time.