Virtual Libido

 

Virtual Libido' is my performance inspired by my life experiences in Bergen.

 

When I came back to Bergen on 29th December, it was a big contrast with my hectic tour in Hong Kong. It was a snowy day. I found the city so empty. The air was so still. I almost heard nothing, or just the sound of my skin touching itself. Wherever I went , I was just alone with myself. I realized that I was in a vacuum again like last summer in Bergen. I still remember when I first arrived, many stores had their doors closed, and when I went in, there were always the same people inside, like in a virtual city game.

 

I would always have the computer close to the window at home, using the free wireless to browse the Internet in order to get rid of this emptiness. I contacted friends on the cyber forum and made phone calls on the web to my friends in Hong Kong. One or two hellos, a bit of fun and entertaining talks.... I felt like an e-pet who needed the care and touch from a human being. The reality was so remote.

 

The performance is a reflection on a lonely body searching for a placebo in Cyberspace when she felt herself to be in a hyper-lonely situation in reality. It’s a rethink of virtual media, a rearrangement of our sense of intimacy.

 

A lonely me, the performer hid in an isolated room in the core of the wall at the main entrance at the centre of Kunsthallen. At the heart of Kunsthallen in Bergen, this secret room has its special position - like a uterus. Visitors saw me through a monitor on an old table and gave a breath to me through a tiny hole, then they could see the bubble fall in this isolated room in the monitor.

 

 

‘Virtual’-  sense of my surrounding

I describe the aesthetic quality of “Virtual Libido” as ‘giving a breath to mirage’. The virtual feeling of the existence of this room gave a sense of confusion about virtual reality and reality.

 

 

Libido’ - senses of my body

Libido continues my thoughts on ‘Life as a circle’ in “Moth-er”.

 

Our origin of life is libido. I feel life is a circle . Detached from the mother’s womb that provided all the ferocious sensual, basic needs and love, an individual is driven to find ‘the same comfort, satisfaction and love in the uterus in the external world. This drive mutated into diverse desires.

 

 

 

'Virtual Libido’ was an inter-active performance

 

//Giving a breath to a person living in mirage

The performance was carried out by an installation for two solitary individuals exchanging their breath in different dimensions of spaces.

 

The audience, as a solitary individual, could see the real-time situation in the secret room with a bird’s eye view pictured by a surveillance camera through the monitor. The space remained undefined in relation to her or him. When the individual breathed into the hole, she or he would see and feel their breath as bubbles falling onto me via the monitor. It was like they were giving a breath to a lonely individual who is living in a mirage.

 

Technically, I used a sensor for the ‘breathe-in’ hole, triggering a bubble machine in the virtual room from a distance by physical computer programming, Max MSP.

 

 

Breathe-out from mirage to reality

I ‘breathed-out’ my bubbles with a straw through a tiny hole to the ticket hall. When the audience was concentrating on the monitor, they heard my sound of blowing bubbles and looked up to the virtual room. They could see the bubble leaking out from the virtual room. A complete process of ‘breathe in and breathe out’ between different dimensions of space, ended up with the same dimension on the ground of reality with the amusement of discovery. The relationship between me and the audience evolved from remote and unknown to close and intimate. The mirage disappeared!

 

 

 

Written by Vik, March 2008