webcam performance/videoart 

Video titled “Fucking At A Distance Is Not Fucking” is based on the performance taking advantage of public webcamera for delivering private message on distance via internet. Reflects an authentic story of a couple turned into a partner-social-artistic investigation focused on the question: How far can you get in virtual relationship? How much you can learn about each other through the communication technology? 

The video captures a couple, who met only once for few hours, shortly before Christmas in December 2011 during a freestyle performance in their homeplaces - Badalona (Catalonia) and Graal-Müritz (Northern Germany) as a last step before meeting each other physically on New Years Eve 2012. The performance lasted 3 days: no rules were settled, only precise time of a day and a place. Final visual material, a suprise for boths, reveals a lot of unexpected situations. Therefore this aesthetic of glitches remained in the video as a reflection of misunderstandings and efforts of assimilation at the beginning of any emotional relationship. 

In this piece, a gap produced by a lack of control over surveillance tool is productively used by artists to manifest reversal impact of technology and humans. A conflict of non - personal communication technology tools (facebook, skype, emails, webcams) involved in our private lives of today also as its ambiguous feature: on one hand the communication technology is enabling a contact, on the other hand is manipulating the content by its technologic limits and hidden strategies. A performance is a technoromantic gesture, a symbolic step from the vicious circle manifesting a refusal of technoauthority and surveillance. A subversive action turning the status of “being used” by technology for “use” the technology: an approppriation of public technology tool/webcam/ to achieve a personal aim. 

Concept and production: Lenka Morávková 
Performance, photos and videos: Vincent Bartels, Lenka Morávková 
Videoedit and postproduction: Anna Turellols 

EXHIBITION 
March and June 2013, festival CRE ART, Pardubice /CZ 
May 2013, festival NATURE, Ljubjana /Slovenia 
May 2012, festival Mostra Sonora I Visual, Barcelona