What Does Your Personal Flag Look Like?

Uroš Krčadinac

What does your flag look like? Your true flag. If you were a country, a small country, and had your own flag, what would that flag of you as a person look like?

This is the question we asked students in the Student’s City. We prepared from them a Web app My flag, which can generate an infinite number of different flags. From the technical point of view, the application represents an expert system, a miniature artificial intelligence, which incorporates a knowledge base on colours and shapes, signs, symbols and layouts. We have automatized vexillology, the science of flags, and heraldic, the science of coat of arms. We have enabled a computer to produce an infinite number of new memetic identities waving on digital screens, just as flags wave at flag poles.

The students opened this application on their smartphones and generated flags. They were repeatedly pressing the Generate Flag button until they found precisely the flag they identified themselves with, their true flag, the flag which would represent them as persons, individuals, personalities. Or perhaps as consumers?

After they selected a flag, we asked why this particular flag.

One student said: Because it is pretty. Another student: Because this is how the music I make sounds like. What else did they say?

Because it calms me down.

Because it is sufficiently Christian, sufficiently Serbian.

Because of eternal flame in dragons.

Because I am insecure like a triangle that stands on its top.

Because I am trying to create a new system during this apocalypse.

In the age of AI, computer programmes can generate nearly everything: logos, slogans, poetry, music, political propaganda. Actually, a large amount of content on the Internet, both commercial and ideological, is generated precisely by computer programmes. This is why developing sensibility, developing new emotionalism towards new forms of digital culture is of great importance for all of us, citizens of 21st century. Especially for students: to understand media, aesthetic, ideological and technological logic behind such algorithms, to became capable of becoming subjects of the technological world, instead remaining only its objects.

The theoretician Katherine Hales asked herself: Are we becoming the codes we punch? The philosopher Boris Buden said: Identity is like a bone to chew which is thrown to you just before you are skinned. The Sufi poet Jalāl al-Dīn Rumi wrote: No flag. Only love. Only the holder the flag fits into. But no flag. The Zen poets from Japan and Chine added: That which is moving, is it a flag or wind? Neither of them, that is your mind moving.

And how do our minds move today?

This essay was published within the catalogue of the first All-Aligned exhibition, organized in the Students' City Cultural Centre (SCCC) Gallery in Belgrade, within the international art project They: Live – student lives revealed through context-based art practices.