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 is its limit?

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Pointless, 2021

We live in times dominated by a new medium that demands new forms of interaction and communication. A medium that imposes such accelerated rhythms that it hardly leaves us room to breathe, digest or reflect. It seems, that in this scenario, absurdity has become the maxim that moves us, and that only those who take it to the extreme, attracting the greatest number of looks and ears to their discourses, will have the opportunity to influence the behavior of the social body.

This was my proposal of 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 is its limit?

Attention has become a valuable asset because it can be captured, measured, and profiled, and then used to target and trigger specific behaviors in us. I harvested my own attention, so you can buy it, in an alluring show designed to grab yours, with the final goal of being able to ask you a 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 ^🔴.

99€ 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 result of the first sheet, digitized. On the right side, a visualization of the time needed to complete the same sheet.

The red points represented those moments in which I had to stop because I had lost my attention, but although they occupied one square, they did not equal to one second. After the performance I can process all the information to visualize the real time needed to complete each sheet, expanding the red points until they occupy the exact number of seconds corresponding to 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).

I knew the minimum time of one hour to complete a sheet, but I could not accurately predict the time it would take to complete each sheet. Even less, the total time to complete all 24 sheets.

↑ The black bars represent the time for completing each one of the sheets of paper. The white bars, the time between sheets, and the red dots, the number of times I had to stop per sheet because I had lost my attention.

This image shows how the amount of times I had to stop decreases after the long breaks I used to get some sleep (7-8, 11-12, 16-17 and 20-21).

The graph generated by the red dots is quite consistent, except on sheet 1 and 10, when Poncho was there documenting the performance, which made it difficult for me to stay focused on the task. He was there at the end of sheet 24, but no relevant alteration can be perceived in the graph. I stayed alone the rest of the performance to reduce distractions.

↑ Every second of the performance in a single image.

The image contains, with a precision that reaches the second, the captured instructions, the moments when I lost my attention and the pauses between sheets.

The performance lasted 47 hours, 55 minutes and 34 seconds in total, which means that the average time per sheet ends up being almost 2 hours, twice the minimum time required.

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

The sheet of paper had a dot grid of 50 W x 72 H cells printed on it (50 x 72 = 3600), meaning that if the grid is filled at one instruction per second, non-stop, a sheet would be the equivalent of one hour (1 hour = 3600 seconds).

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

My task consisted of following 86400 one-bit instructions, randomly generated by a computer at the speed of one instruction 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 is its limit?

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

Request your artwork.