Camille de Noray

Stickyrama explores the relationship between ecological crisis and attention crisis as being two sides of the same coin: the environmental crisis. The economy of digital platforms depends on the user’s attention time, and its actors generate profit from the extraction of users’ data. Programming applications and algorithms, designing interfaces, designing the physical objects through which these platforms are accessed: the entire user experience production chain is geared towards the goal of capturing attention time. Stanford University’s research laboratories, using behavioral analyses, are working to optimize these technologies and increase their «stickiness» or their «retention index». The limited resource of attention is falling prey to a competitive economy, impacting our sleep times and enclosing our imaginations. But technology is a pharmakon: both cure and poison, it is only a reflection of how we use it. Based on a psycho-social critique of the phenomena of capital accumulation through the extraction of time and psychic resources, Stickyrama exhausts to the point of absurdity a metaphor of capture and extraction. Based on the attention as a unit predictable by marketing, this animated film proposes an inverse experience, in which the viewer’s attention is aroused through the grotesque image, opening up to interpretation and stimulating the imagination. The cameleon, an insect predator with a sticky tongue, a professional capturer, a desert dweller and sometimes cannibal, embodies the worker of captology, a digital marketing discipline born in Stanford laboratories that plays on the same sticky predation of man towards his fellow creatures.