Photo courtesy Toon Fibbe en Laura Wiedijk, 2022.
Photo courtesy Toon Fibbe en Laura Wiedijk, 2022.
17 Reasons People Aren’t Listening to You
Toon Fibbe and Laura Wiedijk
2 till 24 Jul 2022
Opening: Saturday 2 Jul 2022 — 17:00 till 00:00 hrs
In the 1999 award winning commercial of Dutch network provider Ben, a disembodied voice - the network itself - addresses the viewer with an eerie level of intimacy:
“Tell me… what is on your mind, what are your dreams? I want to hear of your plans, all of your thoughts.”
The network shows interest. We can tell it everything and it will listen - seemingly without judgment. Almost like a therapist - solely reflecting ourselves back to us. Or a guardian-angel perhaps, invisible, but there all the time in the clouds.
Fibbe & Wiedijk are fascinated by the early marketing strategies of the first mobile and internet network providers as they were tasked to normalize constant and invasive connectivity to the average, not yet connected consumer.
Nowadays we are told the internet is a data harvesting machine, that it poaches our brains and our bodies for its own benefit. But remember how the network’s damp tongue felt when it licked your wounds? How warm the shelter feels when you fall asleep listening to its slow, algorithmic breathing?
We are its users and it can use us.
Cut us up. Use us. Abuse us.
But,
please
see us.
And divide and break us, into community.
In the installation, 17 Reasons Why People Aren’t Listening to You, Fibbe & Wiedijk associatively explore the question whether there could be unconscious pleasure in the way the internet surveils us. What if we secretly enjoy it? To be seen, to be heard, to be guided and to not be forgotten?
Photography by Ilya Rabinovic
Photo courtesy Toon Fibbe en Laura Wiedijk, 2022.