The Object of the Internet Original

The Object of the Internet is the theatre of a dystopic, post-human fiction, in which only some resonant traces of a few selfies remain and are artificially animated on social networks. Condemned to the status of sterile solipsism, these selfies move in the sidereal void of the end of the internet. While the experience’s visual element is purely analogue, the work explores a concept associated with digital culture, namely the selfie. The experience produced by the installation relies to a large extent on the transformation of the visitor’s reflection. The duplication of the participant’s face caused by the mirrors creates echoes that suggest the existence of a virtual space. During the experience, this space gradually transforms, decomposing the participant’s face until it obliterates it. The decomposition of the self’s reflection is itself a reference to the commodification of human relationships introduced by “online” existence. A quote by Carmen Hermosillo, the first paid blogger on social media, accompanies the work and underlines the dehumanizing aspect of this world: “I have seen many people spill their guts online, and I did so myself until, at last, I began to see that I had commodified myself.” The installation’s structure and the nature of the experience it produces is inspired by the Dreamachine, a technological device created in the 1960s by Beat poet Brion Gysin and Ian Sommerville. An updated version of this device is part of the exhibition, creating a dialogue between The Object of the Internet and this historical foothold. William Burroughs, a Beat Generation writer and Gysin’s friend, was also a strong advocate of the Dreamachine. Frequently associated with the “cyberdelic” movement, this artist was one of the thinkers who helped to imagine what the cultural space created by electronic communication might become in the future. The Object of the Internet proposes not only an inversion of the Dreamachine mechanism, but also a critique of the utopic vision of electronic communication that dominated 1960s counterculture.