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 web to my friends in Hong Kong. One and two hellos, small funs and entertaining talks.... I felt myself like an e-pet who needed the care and touch from human being. The reality was so remote.

 

The performance is a reflection on a lonely body searching for placebo in Cyber space when she felt herself in a hyper-lonely situation in reality, a rethink on virtual media rearrange our senses of intimacy.

 

A lonely me, the performer hided in an isolated room between the wall and at the middle of Kunsthallen. At the core of Kunsthallen in Bergen, this secret room has its special position - like a uterus. Visitor 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 exist of this room giving a sense of confusion about virtual reality and reality.

 

 

Libido’ - senses of my body

Libido continues my though on ‘Life as circle’ in Mother.

 

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

 

 

 

'Virtual Libido’ was an inter-active performance

 

//Giving a breath to a person living in mirage

The performance carried out by an installation for two solitude individuals exchanging their breath in different dimension of spaces.

 

The audience, as a solitary individual, could see the real-time situation in the secret room with a top objective 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 will see and feel their breath as bubbles falling onto me via the monitor. It was like they are 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 bubble and look up to the virtual room. They could saw the bubble leaked out from the virtual room. A complete process of ‘breathe in and breathe out’ between different dimensions of space, end up with the same dimension on the ground of reality with amusements of discovery. The relationship between me and the audience evolves from remote and unknown to close and intimate. The mirage disappears!

 

 

 

Vik wrote, March 2008