Flow - Room 4

The informatization and diffusion of the Internet deeply conditioned our way of experiencing reality and living and remembering Matter, enabling an idea of dematerialized reality. To some extent, it is almost like our memory of the concrete world – and its knowledge – increasingly depends on the possibility of staying connected to the information flow the web provides us with, beyond which the very substance of reality seems to get lost in the information void. The section dedicated to Flow dives into the tension between reality’s materiality and the apparent immateriality of information flows. For a long time, the Internet has been perceived and described as a disembodied entity, an abstract place where space and time are nullified by instant messaging. However, the rediscovery of digital materiality has gradually re-emerged over the last decade, developing hand in hand with a widespread realization that we do not live in two separate worlds. Instead, we occupy a single environment inhabited equally by physical objects and data flows. Everything physical is translated into information which, in turn, affects and is related to what is material.