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“Madritmos” (“Mad”: Madrid “ritmos”: Algorithms) is an interactive digital, kinetic, geo-location performance project, that uses algorithmic functions calculated in a custom GPS Tracking Android Phone App to direct the user’s or “passengers,” to move around the city of Madrid, Spain. Influenced by the French Situationists who experimented with numerous rules for navigating Paris with the intention of breaking from routine to re-experience Paris from new perspectives, “Madridritmos” will use a custom phone app that, when shaken, will guide the “passengers” through the city of Madrid, with directions and distances as well as required activities, such as sampling cuisine or asking the nearest person their name, and then shaking the phone again for the next directive. Directives are intended to guide the user/passenger through the city exposing elements of navigational chance. The movements of the user/passenger will be tracked via GPS and used to control the movements an automated kinetic interactive tapestry-style curtain in one of the large foyer windows in the entrance of the Medialab Prado. A small gap in the two sided curtain will seem to be tracking, moving left and right, revealing the perspective location from the point of the viewer to the point of the user/participant that is out navigating the Madrid.

At moments while navigating Madrid, a “siesta”-based directive will appear on the user/passenger’s phone screen directing them to “sleep,” “dance,” “sing,” “eat,” “drink,” “love” or other. These phone app directives will simultaneously trigger the curtain to animate with familiar associative gestures to the directives, along with associative sound bytes. The “sleep” directive for instance, will trigger the curtains to close as the sound of someone snoring can be heard, while the dance directive will cause the curtains to close and then to dance left and right while closed. Within Madrid, with the conflict of increasing interests in business productivity, observance of siesta is in fact under scrutiny and is disappearing. So for this reason, when the user in the field receives the siesta-based directive, they are not asked to sleep, eat, dance or sing, but rather to work. On screen below the title of “Siesta” appears a directive in sentence form requiring the user/participant to input specific numbers into fields in a corporate looking screen containing form fields that resemble an Excel spreadsheet. When the task is complete, the “Siesta” session closes, and the chance-based navigation system continues where you left off in the city, and in the Medialab-Prado, the curtain opens and continues tracking the user/participant from their present location.

Lastly, the distance between the user/participant and the Medialab-Prado window will be reflected in the size of the opening of the curtain. The distance of the user/participant from the Medialab-Prado is directly proportionate to the gap between the left and right curtain. If the user/participant is near the Medialab-Prado, then the gap between the left and right curtain will be larger. Conversely, if the user/participant is a significant distance away, then the gap will be small.

This concept was implemented in three other projects, in collaboration with artist Reza Safavi, which employed different algorithms, materials, activities, and gestures to reflect significant elements inherent within the cultures of the communities where these projects exhibited. Egyrithms’14 explored the characteristics latent within navigating Cairo. Dabarithms’14 explored those in Dubai, and Beirithms’16 in Beijing. Egyrithms’14 and Beirithms’16 explored the application of GPS movements to generate physical drawing systems with projections that mapped the directive actions in the local space. Dabarithms’14 mapped the GPS movements digitally and triggered nine fairy drones to launch from their perch and fly away when the “find a wish” directive appeared within the user/participant’s phone app.

The algorithms/navigational rules, content, and activities generated from the directives and actions of Madritmos ’16 are all influenced by the location, culture, current events and time it is made. The interactive curtain is both playful and significant with the consideration of our naturally occurring circadian rhythms and internal biological clock. The circadian biological clock is said to be controlled by a part of the brain called the Suprachiasmatic Nucleus (SCN), a group of cells in the hypothalamus that respond to light and dark signals. From the optic nerve of the eye, light travels to the SCN, signaling the internal clock that it is time to be awake. The SCN signals to other parts of the brain that control hormones, body temperature and other functions that play a role in making us feel sleepy or awake. In the mornings, with exposure to light, the SCN sends signals to raise body temperature and produce hormones like cortisol.

READ BELOW FOR A DEEPER ANALYSIS OF THE WORK:

Madritmos (2016): Algorithmic Wandering, Circadian Rhythms, and the Politics of Productivity

Max Kazemzadeh’s Madritmos (2016), developed during a residency at Medialab-Prado in Madrid sponsored by Banco Sabadell, is an interactive digital, kinetic, and geolocative performance project that explores the relationship between urban navigation, chance, embodied experience, cultural rhythms, and the demands of contemporary productivity. By using a custom GPS-tracking Android application to direct participants through Madrid while simultaneously translating their movements into the behavior of a kinetic curtain in a public foyer, the work connects the intimate experience of wandering through a city with the mechanical and institutional rhythms of the space from which that wandering is observed.

The project’s title combines “Mad,” referring to Madrid, with “ritmos,” meaning rhythms, and invokes the algorithmic structures through which movement and experience are organized. Its conceptual framework draws on the Situationist International’s experiments with urban wandering, particularly the practice of the dérive, while extending these ideas into the context of mobile computing, responsive architecture, and the increasing pressure to organize everyday life around economic productivity.

At the center of the work is a contradiction: the participant is invited to abandon habitual patterns of navigation and encounter the city through chance, yet this freedom is mediated by an algorithm that determines where to go, what to do, and when to stop. The project then introduces a second contradiction by placing these exploratory activities in tension with the institutional expectation of work. When the application issues a “Siesta” directive, the participant is not invited to rest or play but instead must complete a task through a corporate-looking spreadsheet interface.

Meanwhile, the participant’s movements are translated into the behavior of a large, two-sided kinetic curtain at Medialab-Prado. The curtain’s opening, closing, and lateral movements make the participant’s distant presence perceptible to people in the building, while its changing gap indicates the participant’s proximity to the institution.

The result is an artwork that operates simultaneously as an urban navigation system, a distributed performance, a kinetic architectural installation, and a critique of the ways contemporary institutions organize time and human behavior.

The project’s central proposition is that the rhythms through which we experience a city are never entirely personal: they emerge from an ongoing negotiation among bodily needs, cultural practices, technological systems, and institutional demands.

Rather than treating Madrid as a fixed geographical environment to be observed, Madritmos turns the city into a field of contingent encounters. Rather than treating the gallery as a passive container for an artwork, it transforms the building’s entrance into a responsive interface for the participant’s movements elsewhere. And rather than presenting rest and productivity as unrelated activities, it stages their conflict through a system that makes the participant experience the institutional demands that increasingly govern everyday time.

1. The Situationist dérive: reclaiming the city through chance

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One of the most important conceptual foundations of Madritmos is its relationship to the Situationist International, the avant-garde movement associated with figures such as Guy Debord that emerged in the 1950s.

The Situationists challenged the tendency to experience urban environments primarily through functional routines: traveling from home to work, following familiar routes, consuming commercial experiences, and organizing movement around predetermined destinations. They proposed alternative ways of navigating cities that could reveal unexpected relationships among architecture, geography, emotion, and social life.

The dérive, commonly translated as “drifting,” was a practice of moving through an urban environment while allowing its attractions, atmospheres, and changing circumstances to influence one’s route. Rather than following the most efficient path between destinations, the participant explored how the city might be experienced through alternative patterns of attention and movement.

The related concept of psychogeography concerned the ways geographical environments affect emotions, behavior, and perception.

Madritmos adapts these ideas to an era in which smartphones and GPS systems increasingly mediate our relationship with urban space.

The participant shakes the phone, receives a navigational instruction, follows its directions and distances, completes an activity, and shakes the phone again to obtain the next directive. The process introduces an element of chance into the participant’s route, interrupting the habitual logic of moving directly toward a known destination.

The activities may include sampling local cuisine or asking a nearby person their name. Such tasks encourage encounters that are not necessarily part of the participant’s original plans.

A familiar street can become unfamiliar when approached without a predetermined purpose. An ordinary stranger can become the center of an unexpected social interaction. A routine journey can become an experiment in attention.

Yet Kazemzadeh’s approach introduces a significant complication into the Situationist model. The participant does not simply surrender to the city’s spontaneous attractions. Their wandering is mediated by a computational system that generates instructions.

This produces a paradox: the participant seeks freedom from habitual navigation by submitting to a different set of rules.

The algorithm becomes a device for disrupting routine, but it also establishes a new structure of behavior. The participant follows instructions that are unpredictable in content yet systematic in form.

This tension makes the project particularly relevant to contemporary digital culture. Smartphones promise to expand our access to information and places, but they also direct attention, structure choices, and establish expectations about how we should move through the world.

Madritmos repurposes these technologies. Instead of using navigation to minimize uncertainty, it uses navigation to introduce uncertainty. Instead of optimizing the route, it makes the route a source of experience.

The result is not a complete escape from technological mediation but an attempt to use technology to make the familiar city newly perceptible.

2. Algorithmic chance: freedom within a system of rules

The custom Android application is central to the project’s conceptual structure because it converts the idea of wandering into an operational process.

Chance in Madritmos is not simply randomness. It is a designed condition in which the participant encounters instructions whose consequences cannot be entirely anticipated.

The phone provides directions, distances, and activities. The participant must respond to those instructions before requesting another. The resulting experience emerges from the interaction between the application’s rules, the participant’s decisions, and the contingencies of the urban environment.

This is a form of structured indeterminacy: the framework is programmed, but the precise experience produced by that framework remains open.

The distinction matters because the artwork does not eliminate structure in pursuit of freedom. It changes the structure through which freedom is experienced.

The participant may not know which street they will visit next, whom they will encounter, or what activity the application will require. Nevertheless, the participant remains engaged in a system whose overall sequence has been established by the artist.

This creates an opportunity to reconsider the relationship between autonomy and algorithmic direction.

In ordinary navigation, an application is often judged by how effectively it helps users reach a destination. In Madritmos, the algorithm’s value lies partly in its ability to interrupt the participant’s assumptions about what a journey should accomplish.

The application therefore does not merely provide information about the city. It actively produces a particular mode of experiencing the city.

This is a crucial distinction. A map represents spatial relationships; a navigational algorithm can organize behavior within those relationships. By introducing activities into the route, Madritmos goes further still: it makes the participant’s movement a sequence of performative tasks.

The city becomes an environment in which instructions are encountered, interpreted, and enacted.

This also raises a question about authorship. The artist creates the rules, the algorithm generates the immediate directives, and the participant realizes them through action. The final performance cannot be attributed exclusively to any one of these agents.

The work is therefore not a fixed choreography but a system for producing variable performances.

Its conceptual openness lies in the difference between programming the conditions of an experience and determining exactly what that experience will become.

3. Siesta versus productivity: the political organization of time

The most pointed conceptual intervention in Madritmos occurs when the application issues a “Siesta” directive.

The project draws on the cultural association between Spain and the siesta, a period of rest traditionally associated with the middle of the day. Although actual working schedules and rest practices vary considerably across contemporary Spain, the siesta remains a recognizable cultural reference through which the relationship between daily life, climate, sociality, and work can be examined.

Kazemzadeh places this cultural reference in tension with the increasing demands of economic productivity. When the participant encounters a Siesta directive, they are not asked to sleep, eat, dance, sing, or engage in another restorative or pleasurable activity. Instead, they must complete a task by entering specific numbers into fields on a corporate-looking screen resembling an Excel spreadsheet.

The contrast is deliberate and consequential. The application invokes a period of rest but delivers an assignment that resembles administrative labor.

The participant is momentarily diverted from the exploratory activity of wandering and placed inside a different behavioral regime. The phone changes from a device that encourages geographical discovery into an instrument for completing a productivity-oriented task.

The Siesta directive thus becomes a miniature encounter with the institutional organization of time.

Time as a resource to be managed

In many contemporary work environments, time is treated as an economic resource. Hours are allocated, tasks are scheduled, performance is monitored, and periods of inactivity can be interpreted as lost productivity.

Within this framework, rest is often justified primarily by its contribution to subsequent performance. Sleep restores energy; breaks improve concentration; leisure supports well-being and ultimately enables people to return to work.

The logic of productivity can therefore absorb activities that might otherwise exist outside its demands. Even rest becomes something to optimize.

Madritmos exposes this tension by making the participant’s interruption into a work assignment. The promised interval of rest is converted into a task whose completion is necessary before the participant can resume wandering.

The interface reinforces the conceptual shift. The spreadsheet-like design evokes the visual language of administrative systems, quantitative management, and corporate labor. It introduces a recognizable institutional aesthetic into an experience that had previously been organized around chance, movement, and discovery.

The participant is not simply told to work. They are placed inside a simulated environment of work, complete with data fields and a prescribed task.

The artwork thus stages a conflict between two different understandings of time:

• Experiential time: time for wandering, resting, social interaction, bodily awareness, and unplanned discovery.
• Productive time: time organized around tasks, measurable outputs, efficiency, and the completion of assigned objectives.

These categories are not mutually exclusive in everyday life, but the installation makes their tension explicit.

The institutional capture of leisure

The Siesta directive also suggests that the demands of productivity can extend beyond the formal workplace. The participant is already engaged in an activity that has been structured as a playful exploration of Madrid, yet the application interrupts that activity and requires administrative labor.

The work therefore raises a question that remains relevant in an era of smartphones, remote work, and continuous digital connectivity: when does a person stop being available for work?

If a mobile device can deliver tasks at any moment, then the boundary between working time and personal time becomes vulnerable to technological intervention. An instrument used for navigation, communication, and leisure can also become a mechanism through which work enters otherwise unrelated activities.

The installation makes this possibility tangible. The participant cannot continue the algorithmic journey until the assigned task is completed.

The task is brief, but its significance lies in the interruption. The participant’s freedom to explore is temporarily subordinated to a system of externally defined requirements.

The Siesta directive transforms rest from an anticipated possibility into a task that must be earned through the completion of work.

This is the conceptual inversion at the heart of the project. The interface promises a break, but the institution reasserts itself through the very mechanism that delivers the promise.

4. The kinetic curtain: architecture as a responsive social interface

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At Medialab-Prado, the participant’s movements through Madrid are translated into the movements of an automated, tapestry-like curtain positioned in a large foyer window.

The curtain is more than a display of the participant’s location. It transforms the building’s architecture into a responsive interface through which the participant’s activity elsewhere becomes perceptible.

A narrow gap between the two sides of the curtain appears to track the participant’s location. As the participant moves through Madrid, the gap shifts laterally. Its width also changes in proportion to the participant’s distance from Medialab-Prado: the opening becomes larger when the participant is nearby and smaller when the participant is farther away.

The curtain therefore translates geographical distance into a physical relationship between two moving surfaces.

This is a particularly effective artistic strategy because it makes an abstract spatial relationship tangible. Distance is not represented solely through a map or a numerical value. It becomes a visible alteration in an architectural object.

The participant’s location is expressed through a gap: an opening whose size changes according to the relationship between the body and the institution.

The curtain as a materialized map

A conventional map presents geographical relationships through a symbolic representation of space. The curtain produces a different kind of map, one that unfolds through movement, material, and time.

Its opening does not provide a complete overview of Madrid. Instead, it registers a changing relationship between a participant and a particular architectural location.

The result is a selective, embodied representation of geography. The curtain translates distance into form without attempting to reproduce the city as a whole.

This makes the installation’s spatial logic particularly interesting. The participant is physically absent from the foyer, yet their movements continually alter its environment. The building becomes responsive to a body that is elsewhere.

The participant’s remote presence is therefore neither fully visible nor entirely absent. It is registered through the curtain’s behavior.

The curtain as a performative object

The curtain also functions as a performer in its own right.

When the application issues certain directives, the curtain executes corresponding gestures accompanied by associated sound effects. A sleep directive causes it to close while the sound of snoring is heard. A dance directive causes it to close and then move laterally in a dancing gesture.

The curtain does not simply display information about the participant’s activity. It interprets the activity through an expressive vocabulary of movement and sound.

This creates a relationship between human performance and mechanical performance. The participant acts in the city, while the curtain performs in the building. The two performances are connected through the software but occur in different physical environments.

The architecture becomes animated by activities that are taking place beyond its walls.

This is an important conceptual extension of the project: the curtain makes the building appear to participate in the participant’s journey. It responds to distant actions and performs gestures that translate those actions into another spatial context.

The result is a distributed performance in which the city and the gallery become interconnected stages.

5. The opening and closing gap: proximity, absence, and institutional attachment

The curtain’s changing gap introduces another layer of meaning. Its width is directly proportional to the participant’s proximity to Medialab-Prado. When the participant approaches the building, the opening widens; when the participant moves farther away, the opening narrows.

At the operational level, this is a spatial visualization. At the interpretive level, it creates an expressive relationship between distance and openness.

The participant’s proximity is registered as an expansion of the gap, while distance produces a contraction. The architecture appears to respond to the participant’s nearness, as though the building were maintaining a material relationship with someone moving through the city.

This can be understood as a meditation on the relationship between an institution and the people whose activities it organizes or supports.

Medialab-Prado is simultaneously a physical site and the location from which the participant’s movements are observed through the installation. The participant’s wandering occurs beyond the building, but the building remains connected to that activity through the tracking system.

The curtain creates a visual connection between the institution and the participant without requiring the participant to remain physically present.

This relationship is particularly significant when considered alongside the Siesta directive. The participant is encouraged to leave the institution’s immediate space and explore the city, but their movements continue to be registered by an installation located within the building. At designated moments, the application also interrupts their exploration with a productivity-oriented task.

The work thus establishes a tension between departure and connection. The participant can move away from the building, but the computational system maintains a relationship between their movement and the institutional space.

It would be too strong to conclude that the curtain necessarily symbolizes surveillance or institutional control. Its behavior can also be interpreted as playful, connective, or expressive. Nevertheless, the work makes visible a condition that is increasingly familiar in digitally connected environments: physical distance does not necessarily end a system’s relationship with an individual.

The participant may be elsewhere, but their activity continues to register within the architecture.

6. Circadian rhythms: the body against the clock

The project’s reference to circadian rhythms broadens its investigation from cultural practices and institutional schedules to biological time.

Circadian rhythms are approximately 24-hour patterns in physiological and behavioral processes. The body’s internal timing system is influenced by environmental cues, particularly light and darkness, and helps regulate processes associated with sleep and wakefulness. The suprachiasmatic nucleus (SCN) in the hypothalamus plays a central role in coordinating these rhythms.

This biological framework is important to Madritmos because the project is concerned with more than the scheduling of activities. It asks how human bodies inhabit time and how social institutions organize that time according to expectations that may conflict with bodily needs.

The participant’s journey through Madrid unfolds according to a sequence of algorithmic instructions, but the participant remains a biological organism. They become tired, hungry, alert, distracted, or interested. They experience the city through physical sensations that cannot be reduced to the application’s route calculations.

The Siesta directive makes this difference particularly visible. It invokes a culturally recognizable form of rest but replaces it with an administrative task. The interface imposes an activity at a moment when the cultural reference suggests a different relationship to time.

The contradiction can be understood as a conflict between biological rhythms and institutional rhythms.

Biological time is not perfectly uniform or identical for every person. It varies with individual circumstances, environmental conditions, and sleep patterns. Institutional time, by contrast, is often standardized through schedules, deadlines, shifts, and measurable units of productivity.

The work places these systems of time in tension without assuming that they can be neatly separated. Human bodies participate in social institutions, and social practices influence the ways people organize their sleep, work, and leisure.

The limits of optimization

The project’s circadian reference also raises a question about the limits of treating time as a resource that can be optimized.

A productivity system can schedule a break, but it cannot guarantee that the break corresponds to the participant’s actual physiological needs. Similarly, an algorithm can determine when a directive appears, but it cannot fully determine how the participant experiences that moment.

The body’s rhythms may not align with the rhythms of the software.

This gap between biological experience and computational scheduling is central to the work’s critical potential. It reminds us that a person is not simply a unit of labor or a point moving across a map. The participant is a living body whose needs and experiences exceed the categories through which the system organizes activity.

The curtain extends this idea into the architectural environment. While the participant moves through Madrid, the curtain performs gestures associated with sleeping, dancing, and other activities. The installation translates these actions into mechanical movement, producing a parallel performance that evokes the body’s relationship to time without reproducing the body’s biological processes.

The distinction matters: the curtain can imitate a gesture associated with sleep, but it does not sleep. It can enact a mechanical dance, but it does not experience the activity as a person might.

This difference creates an intriguing relationship between biological life and technological representation. The machine can reproduce the visible or audible signs of an activity while remaining outside the lived experience that gives the activity meaning.

The artwork consequently asks whether the rhythms of human life can ever be adequately represented by the systems designed to track, schedule, or simulate them.

7. Sound, gesture, and the translation of experience

The curtain’s movements are accompanied by sound effects associated with the application’s directives. Snoring accompanies sleep; lateral movements evoke dancing; other instructions trigger corresponding mechanical gestures and sounds.

This combination of sound and movement gives the installation an expressive vocabulary. Rather than translating the participant’s activities into numerical data alone, the work translates them into recognizable actions.

The result is a kind of algorithmic pantomime: the software initiates a gesture, the curtain performs it, and sound reinforces its association with a human activity.

This is important because the project moves between different forms of representation. The participant experiences the directive through a phone screen, enacts it within the city, and triggers a mechanical response in another location. The curtain then communicates the directive through movement and sound.

Each translation preserves certain aspects of the original action while changing others.

A dance performed by a person is not equivalent to a curtain moving from side to side. Yet the mechanical gesture can evoke the idea of dancing, making the relationship between the two performances perceptible.

Similarly, the curtain’s closing motion and the sound of snoring can signify sleep without reproducing the biological state itself.

The installation therefore distinguishes between an activity and its representation. It demonstrates how digital systems can translate behavior into expressive signs while inevitably transforming the experience they communicate.

This process also gives the work a playful dimension. The curtain’s gestures introduce an element of theatricality into the institutional foyer, making architecture appear to act out the participant’s distant activities.

The building becomes a stage on which the traces of urban life are performed through a mechanical surrogate.

8. Public and private space: the city as a distributed stage

Madritmos connects two spaces that ordinarily function differently: the public urban environment through which the participant moves and the institutional foyer in which the curtain performs.

The participant encounters Madrid directly, moving through its streets, following instructions, and interacting with people and places. Meanwhile, the foyer presents a mediated version of the participant’s activity to people who may never encounter the participant in person.

The two locations become linked through GPS tracking, software, and mechanical movement.

This arrangement complicates the conventional division between the place where an action occurs and the place where it is observed. The participant’s performance is distributed across multiple locations, and the installation provides a point of connection between them.

The work also changes the meaning of the gallery audience’s role. Visitors to Medialab-Prado do not necessarily need to undertake the navigational journey themselves to encounter the work. They can observe the curtain’s changing behavior and infer that an activity is unfolding elsewhere.

Their experience is therefore different from that of the participant. The participant experiences the city’s streets, encounters, and instructions directly; the gallery visitor experiences a partial, mechanical interpretation of those activities.

Neither perspective provides a complete account of the work.

This difference is significant because it makes the installation a study of mediated presence. The participant’s actions are accessible to the gallery only through the system’s chosen representations. The curtain communicates movement, proximity, and selected activities, but it cannot convey the entirety of the participant’s experience.

The work thereby raises questions about what it means to be present in a digitally connected environment. A person can influence a space without physically occupying it, while observers can encounter the traces of an activity without having access to the activity itself.

The installation’s distributed structure turns this condition into a physical and theatrical experience.

9. Cultural specificity and the Madritmos series

The project belongs to a broader series of location-responsive works developed by Kazemzadeh, including Egyrithms (2014), Dabarithms (2014), and Beirithms (2016), created in collaboration with Reza Safavi. As described in the project documentation, these works employed different algorithms, materials, activities, and gestures to explore characteristics associated with the cities in which they were presented.

This broader framework is important because it positions Madritmos within an ongoing investigation of how location-based technologies can be adapted to particular cultural and urban contexts.

The underlying methodology is not simply to use GPS as a convenient technical feature. Rather, the project treats geographical location as a source of conceptual material. The rules of navigation, the activities assigned to participants, and the responses of the physical installation are shaped by the place in which the work unfolds.

In Madritmos, the relationship between Madrid, cultural rhythms, the siesta, and productivity gives the system its distinctive conceptual emphasis.

The work’s cultural specificity also raises a methodological question: how can an artist use recognizable cultural practices without reducing a complex society to a simplified set of symbols?

The siesta provides an effective point of entry because it makes the relationship between rest and productivity immediately legible. However, contemporary Madrid cannot be understood through this practice alone. Work schedules, cultural habits, economic conditions, and individual experiences vary widely.

The strongest reading of the project is therefore not that Madrid possesses one definitive rhythm, but that its rhythms are contested and changing. The siesta becomes a lens through which to examine the conflict between inherited cultural associations and contemporary institutional demands.

This approach gives the project broader relevance. Other cities have their own temporal practices, spatial conventions, and relationships between work and leisure. A location-responsive artwork can investigate these differences by creating systems that emerge from the specific circumstances of a place rather than applying an identical formula everywhere.

The project thus suggests a model of media art in which algorithmic structure and cultural context are mutually constitutive. The software provides the operational framework, while the local environment supplies the histories, practices, and tensions through which the framework acquires meaning.

10. The philosophical impact: reclaiming time, space, and embodied experience

The conceptual significance of Madritmos emerges from its connection of three systems that often operate separately in everyday life: geographical navigation, institutional productivity, and biological time.

The GPS application reorganizes the participant’s movement through Madrid. The Siesta directive introduces the demands of administrative work into the participant’s exploratory journey. The kinetic curtain translates these activities into a mechanical performance within an institutional building.

Together, these elements reveal that time and space are not neutral containers for human activity. They are actively organized through cultural expectations, technological systems, and institutional priorities.

The Situationist influence establishes the possibility of experiencing a city outside habitual routes. The algorithmic application turns this possibility into a structured experiment. The Siesta directive exposes the pressure of productivity, while the curtain makes the participant’s distant movement perceptible within the architecture.

The work’s central contradiction is that it uses a technological system to question the very forms of behavioral organization that technology can reinforce.

The application creates opportunities for unplanned encounters, but it also dictates instructions. The participant explores the city, but their movements remain connected to a tracking system. The Siesta directive promises a culturally recognizable interval of rest, but it instead demands administrative labor. The curtain performs gestures associated with human activity, but its movements remain mechanical representations.

These contradictions prevent the work from offering a simplistic opposition between technology and freedom. Technology can interrupt routine as well as reinforce it. Algorithms can create opportunities for discovery as well as constrain choice. Architecture can register distant human activity while also reminding us that such activity is being mediated through a system.

The work’s critical potential lies in making these tensions perceptible.

Its treatment of time is particularly consequential. Biological rhythms, cultural habits, work schedules, and algorithmic instructions all operate according to different temporal logics. Madritmos brings them into contact, asking what happens when the unpredictable rhythms of embodied life encounter systems designed to organize behavior.

Ultimately, the project proposes that reclaiming the city requires more than changing one’s route. It requires reconsidering the systems that determine what counts as a meaningful use of time, which activities are valued, and how people encounter their environments.

The artwork transforms wandering into a form of critical inquiry, using algorithmic direction to expose the tensions between spontaneity and control, rest and productivity, and embodied experience and technological representation.

11. An integrated conceptual reading

Element of the installation	Conceptual significance
GPS-guided wandering	Situationist dérive, psychogeography, and the disruption of habitual movement
Shaking the phone for new directives	Chance, structured indeterminacy, and algorithmic authorship
Activities involving strangers and local experiences	Social encounter, embodied discovery, and urban participation
Siesta directive	Cultural memory, the politics of rest, and the demands of productivity
Corporate-style spreadsheet	Administrative labor, quantification, and institutional control
Kinetic tapestry curtain	Responsive architecture, mechanical performance, and mediated presence
Variable gap in the curtain	Proximity, distance, spatial representation, and institutional attachment
Associated sounds and gestures	Translation of human activity into mechanical signs
Circadian rhythms	Biological time and the limits of standardized schedules
The relationship between Madrid and Medialab-Prado	Distributed performance and the technological mediation of public space

The project’s achievement lies in its ability to connect these elements through a single participatory system. Navigation becomes performance; performance becomes data; data becomes kinetic movement; and a cultural reference to rest becomes a confrontation with administrative labor.

Rather than presenting a fixed argument about urban life, Madritmos establishes conditions in which participants and observers can encounter the contradictions that organize their own experiences of time and space.

Its broader philosophical contribution is to suggest that interactive art can function as a form of critical infrastructure: a designed environment that temporarily reorganizes ordinary behavior in order to make the structures governing that behavior perceptible.