Sparked by an epiphanic reading of Lisel Mueller’s poem “Monet refuses the operation”, this series of installations explores the possibility of reconsidering our engagement with the internet as a transcendent spatial experience in which the “world is [still] flux”. The poem reflects on Monet’s initial decision to not medically treat his cataract, a condition in which the eye becomes increasingly opaque, and how this refusal might even have benefited his painting. Mueller’s crucial insight is that an apparent flaw can create openings towards new experiential paradigms and even reveal the limitations of the purely functional order of things. Following this idea, the installations seek to shed a different light on what is effectively dismissed as non-sensical oddities in our habitual cyber-interactions: failed algorithmic pattern recognitions, dead links leading nowhere, bad gateways, pages without apparent functions, visual glitches or liminal, ‘dangerous’ hosts. These phenomena are gradually vanishing in the increasingly streamlined online experience on private platforms, a fact which may well be seen as the true cataract befalling the digital user: a growingly opaque interaction with a medium of untapped vivid possibility. The installations therefore attempt to make the viewer adventure into the repressed imaginary of the internet’s banished ruins without the aid of an interface.
Photo by Mike Zenari
