The Sadness of the Machine is a visual and audio investigation into the multilayered world an individual has access to due to the proliferation of technologies and their adaptability to particular and specific needs.

To the world that, consequently, often becomes a series of exclusive and personal realms. To the environment where individuals, although physically similar to one another, are separated by landscapes that are increasingly dissimilar.

So how do we know how to maneuver within the grid of our information-intensive environments?

How do we tap into an environment where ever-changing temporalities have become the norm?

Is there an easy and universal way for us to learn how to navigate those, often confusing and complex spaces?

How do our minds make meaning and sense of the world we live in?

The purpose of the video is to raise those questions. To take the viewer by surprise and instigate a feeling of awe and, consequently, encourage the audience to take some time and indulge in a moment of contemplation and reflection.

In the course of our everyday navigation through spaces, unnecessary noise often takes away our focus and affects our sense of direction, both physical and virtual. The Sadness of the Machine aims at creating an environment where that noise is reduced to a minimum. And that applies to both audio and image.

A great blue heron serves here as a metaphor for mindful stillness and a symbol for surviving, adapting and thriving in a habitat that is undergoing constant change.

The Sadness of the Machine was a participant of Inside/Outside: Working Our Way Out of the Damaged Now. Design As Dialectics at the San Francisco State University Design Gallery.

Inside/Outside is a discourse manifested as an exhibition of experimental design work. Inside/Outside is a discourse within this practice with a specific philosophical question, on how design can reveal the unrealized potentialities of our world (as explicated by a passage by Frankfurt philosopher Theodor Adorno). The exhibition’s aim is to offer a dialogue on design as a practice that can “dialectically” change perceptions and reveal unexpressed potentialities. The theme, the concept and the assumptions are experimental by nature.