time_together 
WhatsApp Conversation Installation

duration: 23.11’

Premiered in Variable Spaces | Blurred Edges Festival 2021, Hamburg

 

Time together is a screen installation which shows a fragmented scene of two people getting closer through a conversation about themselves.

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It’s an exploration about the emotional potential, different beginnings, distortion, idealisation, projecting oneself’s desires onto the other, reality gaps, in this case produced by WhatsApp.

It came out of the reflection on how our mind and world is shaped by the tools we use and about how our way of feeling is progressively tuned with these new means.

Does the time we spend with someone depend, in the same way as a few years ago, on the physical space we share?

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Is this time we spend with someone, no matter how, the new space?

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The installation consists on multiple devices reproducing synchronised videos of the same fragmented scene, recorded from different angles/perspectives, showing two people talking through WhatsApp. 

There are 2 screen monitors displaying the performers, 4 iPads with shots of the surroundings and 2 mobile phones reproducing a video screenshot of the WhatsApp conversation they are having at that very moment.  

 

Background

We had never met and had never talked each other directly about ourselves.

We chatted about our works, about nothing, about our daily things sometimes, the weather but mainly about WhatsApp itself. We agreed to see how far we could get and decided after a couple of months chatting on WhatsApp to write how each of us imagined the other. So, we wrote down on a piece of paper a description of the projection we created of the other in our mind.

This chat is just a normal chat. It’s just a talk about this constructed image we had individually created of the other. But just one in the sea of fluent online interactions we had.

 

Link to instagram of the piece: @paperswing_

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Link to WhatsApp Chat:

Pablo's Screen

https://md.darmstadt.ccc.de/s/e5vfX1GeR

Alicia's Screen

https://md.darmstadt.ccc.de/s/IrnGIpyTI

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