“Once upon a time there was a mermaid, a mermaid with wings. The mermaid was a daughter of the river god Aquelaos and the poetry muse Calíope. She led a calm life together with her sisters. Lidia played the flute, Partenopea the cello and Leucosea devoted herself to literature and songs. As time went by, the mermaid lost her wings, next she turned blonde, silly, old, and then she became a witch. Also she became indecent! And in this project she even became a philosopher and therefore bald. But, what really happened to the mermaid?”
SirenaEstereo is an interactive installation using information collected from Twitter, in order to talk about female stereotypes. In a ludic way, it aims towards a reflection on the meaning of creating stereotypes, exploring this through the absurd and humorous.
SirenaEstereo is set in an exhibition room as well as on Twitter. Both are connected and they change each other through the intervention of a participant. An application is projected in the exhibition room, where a sort of "pod" represents users of Twitter that have launched tweets with proposed stereotypes. This kind of “ecosystem” is completed by the use of a symbolic character: the mermaid.
A mythological figure that initially lacked negative connotations but through history were attributed various negative ones. She represents the woman. For both, the fish and the mermaid, the proposed aesthetics ensue from the appropriation of animated internet gifs..
The participant can interact with them and by doing so observe those tweets that contain stereotypes. Also, the participant's interaction can send a response towards Twitter: a retweet (RT). But this intervention is not pure, sent RT is modified by the application which substitutes the stereotype by its “supposed opposite”, originating illogical and funny phrases.
So, one could say sirenaEstereo is a RT machine, part of an experiment, a metaphor. But that it above all is a caricature of a caricature; describing what we do when we create stereotypes. If SirenaEstereo can make us laugh at ourselves and make us understand how irrational it is to create stereotypes, in this case concerning women, the initial project objective is achieved.