The UCE project is driven by the urge to build interactive experiences — a close-up exploration of modern semiotics through themes that caught my attention: AI, cognitive capacity, the erosion of focus, and the hidden structures beneath. Alongside these ideas, I wanted to create interactive visualization tools with Rive that dovetail with the project’s core themes. This work does not pursue any scientific purpose; instead, it reflects a personal inquiry, shaped and refined with machine assistance for English orthography.



INTRO

We live in an age where information is infinite.

Endless content flows through us, swiped, saved for later (and never opened again). A video explains what a book once did. A tweet replaces a lecture.
Everything is faster, shorter, louder. But while access has exploded, understanding hasn’t kept pace.

We’ve never consumed so much and digested so little.
This isn’t just information overload it’s a cognitive economy where quantity eclipses depth.

AI interpreation of Rodin's "Le penseur"

A big credit goes to Tom Kan — I was inspired by his sequence in Enter the Void (2009), which I used as a reference input for some of the machine-generated designs above.

"Brain rot" is Oxford University Press's Word of the Year for 2024. It refers to the perceived decline in mental or intellectual state, particularly due to excessive consumption of trivial online content. 
The term gained prominence due to increased concerns about the impact of online content, especially on social media, and its usage has significantly increased. 
An UCE represents a symbolic unit of content that a person can cognitively process and retain during a short, meaningful experience.
It allows us to compare different platforms and knowledge systems from oral storytelling to AI-generated text on a common cognitive scale.
The Unit of Cognitive Experience (UCE) is a symbolic construct created for this project, not a scientific metric, but a tool to qualitatively compare and visualize the historical and ongoing expansion of accumulated content in cultural mediation systems.
Knowledge used to trickle.
Now it floods. From the slow, deliberate cadence of the printing press to the manic bursts of Instagram stories and AI-generated content, each new platform has compressed time and inflated volume.
What once took decades to shape books, broadcasts, early websites now emerges in seconds, scaled to billions. 

The curve isn’t just exponential; it’s unstable.
And in this race to produce more, faster, the question of what we’re actually learning gets buried under how quickly we can consume.
Cognitive Density and Saturation

In the past, cognitive units were limited in volume, but each one was meant to be deeply processed and understood. Think of Trajan’s Column in ancient Rome a single, continuous story carved in stone, meant to be followed slowly, with attention and reflection.

Today, with the digital explosion, information piles up endlessly, but cognitive density our ability to hold and process information at a deep level has weakened. Speed, volume, and the short lived nature of content dilute our attention.

Platforms like YouTube, Instagram, or GPT allow for a massive accumulation of content, but their fragmented and fast formats don’t support deep understanding the way older mediums did.

Even though we now have access to an enormous amount of information, much of it is watered down by the format (short videos, stories, posts), which rarely encourages slow reflection. It’s easy to access things, but that information doesn’t always turn into real knowledge.
Paul Virilio in Open Sky warned us. When everything accelerates, nothing has room to unfold. 
The bombardino crocodilo-core, the cognitive glitches we scroll through daily, they’re not anomalies, they’re symptoms. In a world where speed trumps depth, absurdity becomes an smart way to register impact. The faster we go, the flatter it all feels. Virilio called it the loss of the world’s vastness.
I highly recommend HOW TO DO THINGS WITH MEME 's post Italian Brainrot and AI semiotics
Ann Blair, an American historian, and the Carl H. Pforzheimer University Professor at Harvard University wrote Too Much to Know: Managing Scholarly Information before the Modern Age (Yale University Press, 2010) showing that information overload is not a new problem. 
Even before the internet — and long before computers — people were already overwhelmed by how much there was to read and remember.
In fact, as soon as the printing press was invented (around 1450), books and texts started multiplying fast. Scholars in the 16th and 17th centuries were already struggling with the density and quantity of books.
So they developed tools to manage knowledge:
-summaries
-indexes
-lists of quotes
-notebooks to collect key ideas
and even "books about books"...
Blair’s main point would be: We’ve always tried to keep up with more information than we can actually process.
But now, with digital platforms, AI, and non-stop feeds, the speed and volume are beyond anything in history.
We’ve gone from a few printed books to:
-millions of websites
-endless videos
-auto-generated content and AIs like ChatGPT producing even more
Just like in the past, the challenge is not access, but making meaning from the flood of content.
From Enric Jardí´s Life is Short
Beyond the conceptual and intellectual dimensions, there is a tangible, often unseen cost associated with sustaining this cognitive flood. We turn our attention to the real world impact of these digital and cognitive demands: the daily consumption of resources such as water, electricity, and human labor like the hidden human toll behind the scenes to maintain the seamless flow of information.
 
This helps us understand not just the scale of our cognitive production, but the environmental and social footprint it leaves behind every day.
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