HAUS N ATHEN, ATHENS, GREECE, 3-6 JUNE 2021

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“[we] exist in a state of continuous construction and reconstruction; it is a world

where anything goes that can be negotiated. Each reality of self gives way to reflexive

questioning, irony, and ultimately the playful probing of yet another reality.”

 

- Sherry Turkle quoting Howard Rheingold in Life on Screen: Identity in the Age of the Internet (1995)

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Tethered is an amalgam of footage recorded from the online platform chatroulette between March and April 2020. It started as voyeuristic practice to witness how the pandemic could be (re)shaping these online channels of communication across the network and it became an exercise of critique on the concept of the saturated self (Gergen). In most cases, during the online visits to the site, the users were given the image of themselves, a sort of feedback of their own immediate reality.

 

The digital promise of togetherness and closeness has repeatedly thrown us into loneliness and a yearning for something even more powerful than intimacy itself, transforming its users into ghostly versions of themselves wandering, lost, in a s(t)imulation of reality where the multiphrenia has become indistinguishable from ‘normal living’*. A constantly emerging new reality to produce significant others, a single endless ‘room’ containing both the infinity of pleasure and the eternity of damnation where hell is other people.

 

2020. Edit by Daniel Pinheiro | Music by NACRE

 

"P.S.: more than anything please don't believe that it's your absence I love, or rather my own love of

your absence..." - Hervé Guibert in The Mausoleum of Lovers (2001)

 

Thank you to Miguel Mendes, Cristian Rodríguez, Jonathan Chomko, Annie Abrahams

 

References:

*Gergen, J. Kenneth – The Saturated Self: Dilemmas of Identity in Contemporary Life (1991)

Baudelaire, Charles – Le Spleen de Paris (1869); Guibert, Hervé – The Mausoleum of Lovers (2001); Turkle, Sherry - Life on the Screen:

Identity in the Age of the Internet (1995)

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Born in Venezuela and based in Porto, Portugal with a background in theatre, Daniel has been exploring, among others, the concept of Telematic Art, using video as a tool and the internet as a platform, merging both languages into a single object of expression. In this field he aims at reflecting on the impact of technology on everyday life and the environment of the Internet as a reflection of a world where the abstract nature of this transmedia movement changes the notions of space, presence, privacy and identity.

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