Can a room speak? What happens when the internet is brought to the physical world? What happens when fictions from different origins merge in a 3d space?

There’s an enigma around the power in objects and spaces, they retain history and meaning in a solid state. They are like keyframes, that allow us to contain big chunks of information in a unit of matter. Sometimes an object or space can succeed at communicating where words fail. An object is a node where millions of cultural interconnections collide: The same object, can mean an infinity of different things, in relation to either another object or the subject’s perception. That’s the worth of context, object, subject, and space in relational aesthetics. In my artistic practice being able to optimize and synthesize meaning in smaller bits with less effort allows me to focus on the bigger picture of what I want to express. Another advantage I see in taking things that already exist and re-contextualizing them rather than crafting from scratch, is that there’s a part of the piece that is completely out of my hands, and this randomness helps me go to unexpected places or get volatile and unpredictable results, which is usually the goal in my creative process.

I’m passionate about how reality continues in the virtual, and while to many it loses a fundamental part of its essence in the process, if you look at it from another perspective, it’s also being infinitely enhanced by an ever-expanding arsenal of cognitive and sensorial tools, leading to some of the most interesting landscapes from the backrooms of the human psyche’s oneiric cosmogram. Opposed to the popular opinion that the internet brings out the fake side of people, I think many of these virtual spaces, rather output some of the most honest and raw faces of individuals in society, in a sometimes subliminal and dreamlike scenario. I resonate with Haraway’s concept of redefining gender and personality as a performative and flexible construct in perpetual remodeling, debunking the outdated belief that intentionally inventing one’s own identity conflicts with authenticity. Fiction sometimes, helps us understand the very truth of the self and projections of the future from the collective mind. In social media this fiction may be a performance molded to how you want to be perceived by society. Conversely, many forums, blogs or virtual reality meeting points, in which people don’t have to be held accountable for what they say, shielded by anonymity, allow individuals to express inner desires and thoughts that would otherwise remain unexpressed.

Some people think of a room as a confinement, a territory; the walls, rather than what it actually contains. A room is not necessarily a physically defined object, but rather a fluctuating network of energies that oscillate through time. The space itself embodies a cohesion of accumulated interactions, which impregnate the room with a personality that usually reflects that of those who inhabit it. In a similar manner, the Internet acts as a huge hall hosting the collective activity and interaction between millions of individuals around the globe. Inside this huge chamber, there are smaller rooms that get more and more specific. The entities that wander these spaces have a desire to navigate these networks with some kind of certainty or meaning, which usually results in a search for an individual identity as well as a collective one. So called “tribes” come together. In ancestral times, the tribe existed for the mere purpose of easing survival of individuals in a unified block. In contemporary societies it is more complex, modern tribes build on codes of identity, such as: music taste, occupation, fashion, ideologies, lacks, fandom, etc. With the rise of the Internet to the mainstream, many of these collectives have merged in unpredictable ways, as internet connects those outcasts who once thought they had no similar ones. The web has served as a multidimensional portal connecting individuals from formerly unconnected ends of reality, creating new niches that get increasingly specific with time.

In “CLAUSTROPHOBIC ALIBI” I would like to point at and create a dialogue around those symbols and semiotics that are specific to post-internet culture. As a person born to a world in which internet already existed, I hold a certain familiarity to many of these codes, at the same time, I feel utterly strange to many others, which is evidently why this dynamic of interest around it is arises.

The piece consists of a room, that somehow projects my interpretation on the semiotics and the memetic of these virtual spaces, in which virtual personas interact with each other. Building on the practice of relational aesthetics, I would like to recontextualize the images, characters and landscapes, that reside in webpages, blogs, forums, encyclopedias, and social media while bringing them into the physical realm, and create a new fiction, new interactions. Visions primarily molded through my lens and ultimately shaped by the spectator, who is provoked to feel immersed in an entirely manufactured situation.

A key aspect in understanding the post-internet semantic, is being playful, primitive and visceral. The meme language, opposed to what many think, is not only a joke in the format of an image, but sometimes an infinitely more complex play of irony and counter irony that evolves through a chain of interpretations, misinterpretations and interventions of a core concept that has been ping-ponged back and forth by one or several internet communities, never fully reaching a “final form”. It can output in any possible format such as a short story, a video, an observation, a song, and so on. Every meme subculture has its own set of principles, morals, ideologies, aesthetics and derived from these; a set of symbols, archetypes, typographies and recurrent concepts.

I think the only way to start to understand these codes, is to approach them within the framework of a game. At the beginning, you might not understand what or why. But there comes a moment when you brake rationality, and intuitively play along. You might have misunderstood the message, and potentially, so did the messenger. But after a series of interactions and experiments, nodal semantic consensus starts to underlie the dialogues; and symbols, dynamics, and play are the safe ground. I pretend to construct an interactive model, using a room and objects as a vehicle for an aesthetic, a language and my own expression of a world that while apparently cryptic, cold and empty; in its core, it holds the very primal underlying forms of human communication.

Materials:

• Mixer
• 6 Klinke/TRS cables
• 4 Monitors (if possible with bases)
• Beamer
• 10-20m Hdmi cable
• Desk
• Clothing Rack and hangers
• Clothes
• Posters

Frames:

• Frame 1: 27cm W x 35cm H
• Frame 2: 27cm W x 35cm H
• Frame 3: 19cm W x 29cm H
• Frame 4: 19cm W x 29cm H
• Frame 5: 17cm W x 23cm H
• Frame 6: 17cm W x 23cm H
• Frame 7: 15cm W x 20cm H
• Frame 8: 13cm W x 18cm H

Photos by Leon Sahiti