Contemporary Laboratory: Spectacle Conference Look, Imagine, Listen, Feel. OFF ROOM, Casa Daros, December 12 2014. Photo: Beatriz Coelho.
House 12 – The Off Room
Diana Kolker Carneiro da Cunha
The contemporary is he who firmly holds his gaze on his own time so as to perceive not its light, but rather its darkness […] But what does it mean, ‘to see an obscurity,’ ‘to perceive the darkness’? […] Neurophysiologists tell us that the absence of light activates a series of peripheral cells in the retina called ‘off-cells.’ When activated, these cells produce the particular kind of vision that we call darkness. Darkness is not, therefore, a privative notion (the simple absence of light, or something like non-vision) but rather the result of the activity of the ‘off-cells,’ a product of our own retina. This means, if we now return to our thesis on the darkness of contemporariness, that to perceive this darkness is not a form of inertia or of passivity, but rather implies an activity and a singular ability. In our case, this ability amounts to a neutralization of the lights that come from the epoch in order to discover its obscurity, its special darkness, which is not, however, separable from those lights.”
Giorgio Agamben1
The OFF ROOM is a space for disconnecting with the virtual and connecting with the material. It is a proposition – or even better, a provocation – that Beatriz Coelho created, motivated by the encounter between her reflections and the questions that emerged during the creation process of the Contemporary Laboratory. The proposal was part of the spectacle conference that happened at Casa Daros on December 12, 2014. It comprised a space that housed only a computer connected to the internet. Beatriz Coelho acted in the room as a kind of inspector to make sure the only action done by the participants was deactivating their Facebook account. She wasn’t interested in opening up field research about the relation between the public and social networks nor in establishing any value judgment about its use. She was interested in making each participant feel the effects of this provocation in themselves. In her words:
When I created the OFF ROOM one of my intentions was to stimulate reflection on an idea that is absurd for many people. What does it mean to deactivate your Facebook account? How do you feel about it? Why would you deactivate your account in an interactive installation during an art event and not in another circumstance? (This question could be applied to other social networks we frequently use.) The experience as an observer led me to a thought that expands itself: the majority of the participants didn’t know how to deactivate their accounts.”
Even if the public didn’t deactivate their account, the proposal wouldn’t be any less powerful. That’s because the power in this work lies in that time gap when the person considers if he/she would deactivate his/her profile in the social network. Beatriz told us that a young man, after understanding what the proposal was about, said: “that’s impossible!” A young girl who agreed to participate showed some concern about it and said to herself: “it will be alright.”
Although built on an action that looked simple at first, the OFF ROOM created a rich field of discussion around the use of social networks, the way we connect or disconnect, the points between the body and the virtual environment, the simultaneity of the connection and the isolation. In this regard, there are strong echoes between the OFF ROOM and the Island (with which there was a relation of simultaneity). How much do we have to disconnect from something so we can connect to something else? How can we do this action without the spectacle of our own images?
Contemporary Laboratory: Spectacle Conference Look, Imagine, Listen, Feel. OFF ROOM, Casa Daros, December 12 2014. Photo: Beatriz Coelho.
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1 Giorgio Agamben. What is an Apparatus? And other Essays. Stanford University Press, 2009.
