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These virtual portraits are extracts from multiple journeys made within the website Chat Roulette; a social network in which participants connect with strangers throughout the world via their web-cams.
Once connected, the website interface randomly generates users together with ‘partners’ who are able to see one another in adjacent windows.
These images were made fractionally before my ‘partner’ decided against any interaction by skipping to the next available person.
Edited from over 4000 screen-shots made in 2010, the portraits are a psychological projection of my own experiences negotiating a long-distance international relationship throughout my postgraduate studies in 2014, played out through Skype and other programs designed to facilitate virtual communications.
The project Terminal deals with notions of connection, in terms of a technological connection via the Internet and in turn an optical device, but also the basic human need to connect with others and physically interact.
During a time in which electronic connectivity is omnipresent, the dislocation that emerges as a consequence is explored in this series, further reinforced by the fragmented material structure of the images.
We have never been so connected with others, yet paradoxically there is an increased absence of tangibility, where intimacy is found with the screen and electronic device rather than with people themselves.