Hello! 👋

My name is Daniel Armengol Altayó, and I am here to participate in the conception and creation of alternatives to the current digital paradigm. My hypothesis is that by having more clarity on how digital information operates and how we relate to it, we can coordinate efforts more effectively towards common goals.

This website is an experiment. Right now you can explore my artistic practice, and my plan is to share my research notes as well, understanding both as complementary to each other.

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↑ Frame from Pointless.

Pointless, 2021
Performance by Daniel Armengol Altayó

I tried to capture my full attention by following random instructions every second for 24 hours. Because, if attention is a limited resource that can be exploited, where exactly does its limit lie?

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Pointless, 2021

We live in an era dominated by a new medium that demands new forms of interaction and communication. A medium that imposes such an accelerated pace that it barely leaves us room to breathe, digest, or reflect. In this scenario, it seems that absurdity has become the guiding principle that drives us, and only those who push it to the extreme —capturing the greatest number of eyes and ears— will have the opportunity to influence the behavior of society as a whole.

This was my proposal for extreme absurdity: I tried to capture my full attention by following random instructions every second for 24 hours. Because, if attention is a limited resource that can be exploited, where exactly does its limit lie?

Attention has become a valuable asset —it can be captured, measured, and profiled, then used to target and trigger specific behaviors in us. I harvested my own attention so that you could buy it later, in a carefully designed spectacle meant to seize yours, with the ultimate goal of asking you one question:

Do you think it is possible to regain some agency over the flows of our own attention?

↑ Digital composition, arranged from left to right and top to bottom, showing the artworks derived from the performance.

Pointless, 2021

Details and dimensions:

Series of 24 original and unique artworks, signed and numbered.
Size of 29,7 W x 42 H cm (A3) including white margins.
Clairefontaine Digital Colour Printing paper 300g.
Dot grid laser printed on the front, performance instructions on the back.
Hand-drawn pixels using black and red Edding 500 permanent makers.
The performance was streamed on Twitch. Videos now hosted on Youtube.

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1/24 ^🔴, 2/24 ^🔴, 3/24 ^🔴, 4/24, 5/24 ^🔴, 6/24, 7/24 ^🔴, 8/24, 9/24, 10/24 ^🔴, 11/24, 12/24 ^🔴, 13/24 ^🔴, 14/24, 15/24, 16/24, 17/24 ^🔴, 18/24, 19/24, 20/24 ^🔴, 21/24 ^🔴, 22/24 ^🔴, 23/24 ^🔴, 24/24 ^🔴.

149€ per artwork, taxes included if applicable.

International shipping included (ships rolled in a tube).

Additional costs such as duties or customs clearance fees, not included.

Payment process via PayPal.

Please do not expose it to direct sunlight to avoid colors fading.

Other pages linking to this page:
Pointless / Attention understood as a scarce resource
Pointless / The design to test the limits of my own attention

These are the rules that governed my actions during the performance. The diagram shows the same logic, but visually.

STEP 1) Sit in front of the paper, the computer and the black and red markers. Focus your attention on the first square delimited by the grid printed on the paper, and start the computer’s process: emit a “yes” or a “no”, randomly, every second.
STEP 2) If the computer says “yes”, paint the square you are focused on, using the black marker, and move to the next square (left to right, top to bottom). If the computer says “no”, just move to the next square. Repeat until you reach the end of the paper.
CONDITION A) If you lose your attention, stop the computer’s process, paint the next empty square with the red marker, and when you are ready to continue, restart the computer’s process, and repeat step 2.
CONDITION B) When you reach the end of the paper, repeat from step 1, until you complete the 24 papers.
IMPORTANT) Keep all breaks as short as possible.

Other pages linking to this page:
Pointless / Artworks

↑ On the left side of the image is the digitized result of the first sheet. On the right side, a visualization of the time required to complete the same sheet.

The red points represent moments when I had to stop due to losing my attention. However, while each point occupies a single square, it does not necessarily correspond to one second. After the performance, I process the data to visualize the actual time required to complete each sheet, expanding the red points to accurately reflect the duration of each break.

The image contrasts the theoretical completion time of one hour per sheet (left) with the actual time required to complete the first sheet (right).

While I knew that the minimum time to complete a sheet was one hour, I could not predict the exact duration of each sheet —let alone the total time needed to complete all 24 sheets.

↑ The black bars represent the time taken to complete each sheet of paper, while the white bars indicate the time between sheets. The red dots mark the instances when I had to stop because I lost my attention.

This image reveals a pattern: the number of times I had to stop decreases after the long breaks I took for sleep (7-8, 11-12, 16-17, and 20-21).

The graph generated by the red dots remains fairly consistent, except for sheets 1 and 10, when Poncho was documenting the performance, making it harder for me to stay focused. He was also present at the end of sheet 24, but no noticeable disruption appears in the graph. For the rest of the performance, I remained alone to minimize distractions.

↑ Every second of the performance in a single image.

This image precisely captures, down to the second, the recorded instructions, the moments when I lost my attention, and the pauses between sheets.

The performance lasted a total of 47 hours, 55 minutes, and 34 seconds, meaning that the average time per sheet was nearly two hours, twice the theoretical minimum.

↑ Empty grid on the left, grid filled with random one-bit instructions on the right.

The sheet of paper featured a dot grid of 50 columns by 72 rows (50 x 72 = 3600). Since the grid had to be filled at a rate of one instruction per second, each sheet was the equivalent of one hour (1 hour = 3600 seconds).

Other pages linking to this page:
Pointless / One hour (at least) per sheet

My task was to follow 86,400 one-bit instructions, randomly generated by a computer at a rate of one per second.

Hello! 👋

I tried to capture my full attention by following random instructions every second for 24 hours. Because, if attention is a limited resource that can be exploited, where exactly does its limit lie?

Do you think it is possible to regain some agency over the flows of our own attention?

Request your artwork.