Verhältnismäßig

Empathy does not respond proportionally to the scale of an event. A single, specific story often elicits a stronger emotional response than a statistic describing a far greater scale of suffering. In psychology, this phenomenon is known as psychic numbing: as the number of people affected increases, the individual’s emotional response diminishes, even though the actual scale of the event is growing.

The installation allows visitors to experience this mechanism without explaining it. From a closed sound box, a specific, emotionally charged piece of information initially plays, edited in the scrolling style familiar from one's own social media feed. A simple turn of the head to the side is enough for a face-tracking system to put what has been heard into a new context: a second, equally accurate piece of information puts the first impression into perspective. Six buttons reveal that this is not an isolated incident, but rather a recurring pattern. The work itself does not pass judgment. It merely shows that empathy is distributed not objectively, but selectively.