When We Love

WHEN WE LOVE is a series of net art interventions that discuss proximity, intimacy, and attention on the internet; tethered under a dating simulator where you date everything.

It is an experience, prompt, and realization about love on screens that extends beyond one screen. Each of the experiences under WHEN WE LOVE can be considered standalone, or part of a collective umbrella of works that explore digital intimacies.

It has manifested itself in performances (Screen Walk, Temporary Performance Assembly), community software (cloudwatching and stargazing), printed matter (the sound of love) and beyond. WHEN WE LOVE is supported with a Rhizome microgrant.

Works

We Are Only Moving Towards Each Other

Last night I had a violently gentle dream. A concrete poem in the browser, a love story, and a dream sequence traversed through closing and opening windows.

Cloudwatching / Stargazing

whenwe.love/stargazing

Cloudwatching is a naming at day. Stargazing is a wishing at night. Each accessible respectively during the day or night of your browser's local time. Even from our screens, we are all under the same sky...

whenwe.love/cloudwatching

Concrete Form

A form simulator.

First commissioned by the HTML Review for their Spring 2023 issue, and performed at 'Inspect Elements' in CultureHub NY/La MaMa.

GAME / CHAT / SHOP

In a decrepit computer cafe, the last day of a MMORPG plays out before its server shuts down forever. Across three windows & scales of space, you're left to ask: where does the game end? where does the self begin?

As a server death comes, players navigate a game, chat, and a shop across browser windows—different dimensions of embodiment, scale, and time in dialogue with each other. Time runs out in your computer shop session, ads disrupt, calls leak, the spam of the real-world against the chaos of the room. The discontinuities of the game and real worlds bring us to search for boundaries that might not exist, where both the avatar and the self are constantly fragmented, where we do not know where our technology ends and where we begin.

Commissioned by Runway Journal for Issue 47: MMORPG.

A Bedroom in Las Piñas

A bedroom in suburban Las Piñas, sometime early 2000. Girls compressed in objects, prayer attributed to action, sainthood provided through asking. Vignettes, selfhoods, and memories from Manila unfolded over years, landscapes, and ways of seeing. A becoming through other people, game shows, television, religion, and dreams. A narrative 'escapist room' recalling 18 years of youth, identity, selfhood, and objecthood in Manila.

A Bedroom in Las Piñas is an ode to early flash escape room games and Jake Elliott's A House in California in a surrealist point-and-click martyrdom simulator. Unfolded entirely through verb-object interactions where you touch, feel, pray, forget, crucify, and castigate the self – logic and language is rewritten.