The Net: installation

The Net is an installation centred on our relationship with the technological world, seen from the perspective of someone who feels trapped within it. From outside, the work can be read in two ways: someone observes another person’s feelings of entrapment, tension and anguish, yet the observer also belongs to that same virtual world. The aquarium acts as a metaphor for the Net, the Internet and the technological world. Video 1 was recorded in a bath filled with water, alluding to that same network surrounding us. Water seeps through, shapes and conditions us, almost without our noticing. The network immerses itself in our lives by exploiting biological dopamine mechanisms, making us feel that we must remain permanently connected even when that connection overwhelms us. Our biochemistry drives us to seek information and the network supplies it without end, producing addiction, tension, emptiness and mental saturation. The two videos playing on a loop evoke both the network’s infinite flow of information and our own dopaminergic mechanisms. The scrolling images of source code come from MoMA. I chose the museum’s website because, when the institution opened, its works represented the avant-garde, just as the Internet once did, and because museums today help reshape our understanding of reality. Seen as if through X-rays, its source code evokes both institution and avant-garde, but also politics and power — as in the network of networks, where nothing is neutral and our awareness of the medium will determine how we navigate those waters.

Eyes and awareness are fundamental to the work as a whole. The eyes, connecting the inner and outer worlds, are also instruments through which we construct our own world. Here, reflections and their images draw us towards an intangible reality that encloses us in a delirium of light and mirrors, confronting us with our inner imagery and our introspective gaze. When we stop looking outwards and turn inwards, catharsis begins. We stand before a threshold beyond the reach of other people’s gaze, where only fiercely honest, lucid awareness remains.