Eighteen artists including sculptors, painters, videomakers and composers, under the curatorship of the students of the Catholic University of the Sacred Heart of Milan, have interpreted the excessive dissemination of information, often inaccurate, and the difficulty of identifying reliable sources: they are the information and new technologies, between 'infodemic' and 'infosophy', the protagonists of the 2023 Art and Spirituality itinerary hosted by the university, now in its fourteenth edition, which this year responds to the title of 'Mips' - Million Instructions per Second .
The information technology sector lends its name to the exhibition: 'Mips' is in fact the unit of measurement that indicates the speed with which a computer processes information.
For the curators, the 'information unit' evokes the IT overabundance that we have to process every day in the shortest possible time, almost like a computer processor.
Already in 2014 Pope Francis had considered that "the speed of information exceeds our capacity for reflection and judgment and does not allow for a measured and correct self-expression".
On the occasion of the World Day of Social Communications, the pontiff issued a warning: "The communication environment can help us grow or, on the contrary, disorient us".
For the rector of the university, Franco Anelli, "the implications of hyper-connection and the pervasiveness of information also question the university reality" and "the potential deriving from the introduction of new tools and the application of new technologies in teaching and in research, as well as in study and learning, they determine an unprecedented availability of access and speed of sharing of data and information, the profound implications of which still remain to be fully understood".
For this reason, the rector underlines the importance of "developing awareness of a theme that affects every aspect of our lives".