atlasemotion.pl

Paradoxically, Photo Emotion may prove extremely useful amid the present crisis of trust and the continual transfer of responsibility for making sense of the media world onto the outside viewer. The observer must endlessly verify not only the authenticity of a story but that of the surrounding reality. We suspiciously wind up our vigilance while losing interest in the people around us. Eventually, distanced from one another and alone, we leave ourselves at the mercy of manipulative media and politics. If there is a good way out of this anthropological knot, let us learn not only to look for it but also to show it. Let us not create images we will not understand, as we so often fail to understand art, events or behaviour.

Even if that does happen, let us admit that we can see we see nothing — even when it is we who are mistaken. Let us move within a circle we have drawn ourselves and expand it slowly, attentively. Let us create our own algorithms locally and keep well away from those created by others, which simulate a person made happy by a product taken thoughtlessly from a shelf. Photo Emotion is searching for something almost no one seeks today: attention. At the Atlas Sztuki Foundation in Łódź (atlassztuki.pl), we have long tried to answer a question that seems increasingly urgent for photography and the image. What remains of photography when almost any image can be generated, enhanced, transformed or faked? We are not looking for a technological answer.

We are interested instead in creating a very simple mechanism that compels an act of noticing. Perhaps this is simply the first genuine attempt to reclaim attention as a cultural value. Noticing is an act. Photo Emotion asks a fundamental question of the twenty-first century: what has to happen for a person truly to notice something? Six seconds is an answer. Limiting the number of recordings is an answer. The absence of likes is an answer. A conversation with a mentor is an answer. These are no longer merely features of the Photo Emotion app. They are elements of a single important attempt — an experiment. For two hundred years, photography has taught us to record the world.

Perhaps the time has come for it to teach us once again to notice the world. This is no longer a competition; it is now our duty to create a School of Attention for young people. Not a school of photography. Not a film school. Not a media school. Photo Emotion is the first attempt to design a technology that does not compete for human attention but teaches people consciously to reclaim it through a very simple mechanism: six seconds, one recording and the need to say to oneself, ‘This is what I want to save.’