Beyond the Quick Conclusion
Abstract
Within this last trimester, we focused on considering knowledge as a form of wealth, a human feature that enables connection across different generations, from past to future ones. This particular act of sharing, though, has known different methods of transmission over time, due to its tight connection with technological media: from being transmitted orally, to parchments and books, knowledge, considered at large in all its aspects, has experienced many forms. It’s within these technological shifts that lay our interest, seeing how from medium to medium a piece of knowledge and the people who approach it change, adapting the shape of the information and its understanding to the medium itself.
As this concept can be true independently from the medium or time, pointing to a characteristic that goes beyond generations, we then decided to concentrate on the one that we have lately experienced with the digital, from the first computers up to now, when the artificial intelligence is getting more and more popular. Not only did this shift bring new technological media, but it also marked a profound change in the materiality that we were used to, passing from paper, between books and notebooks, to screens able to hold the amount of information of entire libraries, grating wider and broader access to its contents and abstracting their form. Slowly, we got used to search bars, to have all different kinds of knowledge available at every moment, moving always more towards pixels and leaving ink and pens behind.
Even if the analogical media are not yet forgotten, like it happened with other media before, we are moving towards an always expanding digitalisation, which would shape our way of receiving and understanding information, and of course knowledge at large too. We can already see our dependency on digital media, from our computers to our now smartphones, and this is only going to increase. This already shaped our approach towards knowledge and information, which is now mostly relying on these media and the search engines that they open up to us, from Google at large, to social media, and lately also artificial intelligence, with platforms like Chat GPT, which give us a direct answer to our question that we most likely accept without further discussion, becoming more passive and detached than with previous media like books, when our search and learning process was more engaging and fulfilling.
Within the process of digitalisation, then, we noticed that we are losing important traits that we relate to the topics of knowledge and fairness, traits we would like to maintain and integrate into the positive sides of the digital. Most importantly, we noticed a loss of connection and intimacy with the pieces of information that we get from the screens, they’re becoming always more and more impersonal with every share, post or artificial chat. With this short movie, The Cookie and the New GPT, we intend to propose a new way of interacting with the digital that would take more into account also these important features of how knowledge has been handed down till now.
By referencing a cookie recipe, we enter a specific kind of knowledge that, in most cases, is passed on within families, pointing in this way to the familiarity that we are now losing in this matter. It’s not only that, but we are also referring to something that can be experienced first-hand, materially, now that most things can be just digitalised, like maps or even concerts. Apart from that, we are also presenting an integrated form of artificial intelligence, one that challenges its users to get off the screen and take an active part in the process of obtaining the information they are asking for, connecting with the real with the support of the digital.
In this way, we hope to address the issues we have pointed out, like the unfamiliarity with the crescent abstraction of knowledge, in a way that can be useful for the next generations, for them to maintain these human features in the digital era, easing the adaptation to new media, the ones we are experiencing now and the ones that will follow.
