≥

The invisible hand i

Gonçalo S. F.

YEAR: 2019

Lisboa

A gesture is an action on existence. It is intangible. It is every movement of all the individuals who construct law firms. Here, it is the camouflaged dynamo of all activity: the silent engine. This firm is born and grows from every gesture, from every individual, from every movement, repeated, each day, diligently. It is this sum of gestures that creates the visible results of labour. To this sum of intangibility, to this imperceptible movement, we called “The Invisible Hand”.

​

From the capture of all the mouse and trackpad movements of more than 400 lawyers and support staff who work at this firm around the world in real-time, an original software reads this information and transforms it into images, making the most invisible work and the abstract nature of the firm visible, between the individual creative explosion and the structuring ability over this energy, exploring the tangents between machine determinism and the random nature of human-created data.

​

A singular poem at the frontier between digital and human, chaos and order, beauty and labour, information and art. While the polymorphic capabilities of the medium used to present the piece helps give it an iconic plastic expression, it is its content – the dialectic between the reality of human action and the virtual nature of digital activity – that gives rise to a piece generated collaboratively by hundreds of computers and people that forms the real artistic object: a representation of the invisible.

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Work commissioned by

MORAIS LEITÃO GALVÃO TELES, 

SOARES DA SILVA & ASSOCIADOS

​

Collective of Two. 

Gonçalo Santana Ferreira / Vasco Barbosa

In a time of neural networks and artificial intelligence, “The Invisible Hand” explores the beauty of the human network and presents the firm as a living organism that is ever-changing and always growing in a dynamic between people and structures, thus synthesising a dialectic of order and chance through a structured arrangement of bits and bytes and translating the intangibility of this combined effort into digital beauty.

​

This first visual iteration of the piece establishes a more profound exploration of the relationship between aesthetics and a particular idea of work.

​

A dialogue between the multiplicity of inputs originating in the action and the gravitational forces that is representative of the aggregating nature of the firm, in a dynamic of permanent formative reciprocity in both parts that are here represented by the apparently chaotic movement of digital particles that, gravitating around this abstract entity, reveal it in a movement of expansion and retraction, of permanent creation and reinvention.

​

The aesthetic and conceptual minimalism of this iteration embodies the elemental elegance and the subtle harmony of the movements of the universe. It results in a piece of great contemplative and reflective appeal on the chaos of creation, of networks of knowledge and of the nature of structures and cooperation.

≥

THE INVISIBLE HAND I

YEAR: 2019

Lisboa

A gesture is an action on existence. It is intangible. It is every movement of all the individuals who construct law firms. Here, it is the camouflaged dynamo of all activity: the silent engine. This firm is born and grows from every gesture, from every individual, from every movement, repeated, each day, diligently. It is this sum of gestures that creates the visible results of labour. To this sum of intangibility, to this imperceptible movement, we called “The Invisible Hand”.

​

From the capture of all the mouse and trackpad movements of more than 400 lawyers and support staff who work at this firm around the world in real-time, an original software reads this information and transforms it into images, making the most invisible work and the abstract nature of the firm visible, between the individual creative explosion and the structuring ability over this energy, exploring the tangents between machine determinism and the random nature of human-created data.

​

A singular poem at the frontier between digital and human, chaos and order, beauty and labour, information and art. While the polymorphic capabilities of the medium used to present the piece helps give it an iconic plastic expression, it is its content – the dialectic between the reality of human action and the virtual nature of digital activity – that gives rise to a piece generated collaboratively by hundreds of computers and people that forms the real artistic object: a representation of the invisible.

In a time of neural networks and artificial intelligence, “The Invisible Hand” explores the beauty of the human network and presents the firm as a living organism that is ever-changing and always growing in a dynamic between people and structures, thus synthesising a dialectic of order and chance through a structured arrangement of bits and bytes and translating the intangibility of this combined effort into digital beauty.

​

This first visual iteration of the piece establishes a more profound exploration of the relationship between aesthetics and a particular idea of work.

​

A dialogue between the multiplicity of inputs originating in the action and the gravitational forces that is representative of the aggregating nature of the firm, in a dynamic of permanent formative reciprocity in both parts that are here represented by the apparently chaotic movement of digital particles that, gravitating around this abstract entity, reveal it in a movement of expansion and retraction, of permanent creation and reinvention.

​

The aesthetic and conceptual minimalism of this iteration embodies the elemental elegance and the subtle harmony of the movements of the universe. It results in a piece of great contemplative and reflective appeal on the chaos of creation, of networks of knowledge and of the nature of structures and cooperation.

</>

Work commissioned by

MORAIS LEITÃO GALVÃO TELES, 

SOARES DA SILVA & ASSOCIADOS

​

Collective of Two. 

Gonçalo Santana Ferreira / Vasco Barbosa

BACK

MENU

Gonçalo S. F.

≥

THE INVISIBLE HAND I

YEAR: 2019

Lisboa

A gesture is an action on existence. It is intangible. It is every movement of all the individuals who construct law firms. Here, it is the camouflaged dynamo of all activity: the silent engine. This firm is born and grows from every gesture, from every individual, from every movement, repeated, each day, diligently. It is this sum of gestures that creates the visible results of labour. To this sum of intangibility, to this imperceptible movement, we called “The Invisible Hand”.

​

From the capture of all the mouse and trackpad movements of more than 400 lawyers and support staff who work at this firm around the world in real-time, an original software reads this information and transforms it into images, making the most invisible work and the abstract nature of the firm visible, between the individual creative explosion and the structuring ability over this energy, exploring the tangents between machine determinism and the random nature of human-created data.

​

A singular poem at the frontier between digital and human, chaos and order, beauty and labour, information and art. While the polymorphic capabilities of the medium used to present the piece helps give it an iconic plastic expression, it is its content – the dialectic between the reality of human action and the virtual nature of digital activity – that gives rise to a piece generated collaboratively by hundreds of computers and people that forms the real artistic object: a representation of the invisible.

In a time of neural networks and artificial intelligence, “The Invisible Hand” explores the beauty of the human network and presents the firm as a living organism that is ever-changing and always growing in a dynamic between people and structures, thus synthesising a dialectic of order and chance through a structured arrangement of bits and bytes and translating the intangibility of this combined effort into digital beauty.

​

This first visual iteration of the piece establishes a more profound exploration of the relationship between aesthetics and a particular idea of work.

​

A dialogue between the multiplicity of inputs originating in the action and the gravitational forces that is representative of the aggregating nature of the firm, in a dynamic of permanent formative reciprocity in both parts that are here represented by the apparently chaotic movement of digital particles that, gravitating around this abstract entity, reveal it in a movement of expansion and retraction, of permanent creation and reinvention.

​

The aesthetic and conceptual minimalism of this iteration embodies the elemental elegance and the subtle harmony of the movements of the universe. It results in a piece of great contemplative and reflective appeal on the chaos of creation, of networks of knowledge and of the nature of structures and cooperation.

</>

Work commissioned by

MORAIS LEITÃO GALVÃO TELES, 

SOARES DA SILVA & ASSOCIADOS

​

Collective of Two. 

Gonçalo Santana Ferreira / Vasco Barbosa

BACK

MENU

Gonçalo S. F.