Babel will transform the large digital facade of the Zagreb Museum into an open-space blog, a social interface which will enable its citizens to publicly express their intentions, strategies, views and disagreements.
Babel is a project using 400 square meters of the LED facade as a means for training democracy. The project’s name, Babel (the Tower of Babel, confusion, Hebrew – babel), was taken from the Bible (Genesis, 11th Chapter), marking the place where the Lord scattered the builders of the Tower of Babel around the world and mixed their languages. However, in this new context, as a work of art located on the facade of the Museum of Contemporary Art, it is supposed to have the opposite meaning – to connect conflicting sides and inspire dialogue.
The blog is activated through a series of diverse access mechanisms (e-mail: babel@msu.hr, blog Babel-Zagreb.blog.hr, Facebook profile Babel Zagreb, text messages at 099 8495532, snail mail at MSU address) that serve to gather the citizens’ opinions on a variety of issues that concern them. The digital facade thus becomes a temporary mirror, a barometer of public opinion and mood, because during these 10 days it will broadcast the flow of the discussion, as if it were a news agency.
By using social networks’ viral opportunities and instrumentalising the anarchist nature of blogs, Francesco Jodice adapts the spatial and temporal dimension of such communication channel into an art project with the intention of recording the standpoints and entropic forces of the city – in real time and on a large scale. Jodice has always questioned the metropolises in an almost entomological manner, focusing his work on the analysis of new relationships between social behaviour and urban landscape on different geographical locations.
