'Together Apart’ explores the possibility of physical touch, love and affection within the digital realm. The work is centred around the mouse cursor and its existence beyond the flat screen.
The cursor indicates the human presence in the digital realm, and thus has become the virtual extension of our bodies, allowing us to move through, explore and dwell in the cyberspace. It forges and carries our digital identity, supposedly a reflection of our physicality, connecting us virtually to our physical world. But what if there is something more to the cursor's movement unknown to human perception, something beyond what we see on the flat screen?
In this scenario, the cursor is unattached from anything physical. It exists alone, dwelling in the endless digital space. Throughout its journey, the cursor starts sensing something beyond the visible flat plane. Wishing to reach that something or someone, to connect with them, it travels through the unimagined but somehow existing layers of the digital world and experiences a thrill only humans do in the anticipation of affection and physical touch.
The video work is a product of a research experiment exploring how our online movement defines our identity. From revisiting our personal interests to reconnecting to our loved ones, we 'walk' our own tracks of exploration within the borders of the computer screen. How different or similar is our physical body to our digital one? And how estranged the alternate reality of that digital self could be– who does it interact with, become friends with, fall in love with? Those questions evolved into a series of visual experiments where I recorded the mouse movement of individuals in reaction to the same content and overlapped them, searching and speculating on what digital love could be. The mouse movements are accompanied by a 3D rendered environment and a poem capturing the thoughts and questionings of the cursor itself.