Kyriaki Goni

Kyriaki Goni’s work explores the relationship between technology and society. She investigates the power of information, the construction of the digital self, human-machine interaction and alternative digital networks. Her new work Daily Declaration of Love (2020), is a video that has been composed with images from Instagram gathered by a scraping algorithm searching the hash tag ‘couplegoals’, along with captions and ‘Likes’. The work explores the ways love and affection are expressed, and declared online, specifically on Instagram. The images are projected as a digital collage on a transparent textile. They raise questions about the increasingly dissolving barrier between the public and the private, the difference between the virtual and the real, the staged and the banal, as well as the gap that exists between the visible and the invisible in the digital domain. In addition, it looks into the iconography of digital self-representation in relation to romantic love and into the different tropes of digital self-performativity. Finally, it aims to engender questions about those virtual, carefully edited and ‘framed’ representations of love on the internet versus the reality of real-time romantic relationships. We find ourselves in the voyeuristic position of observing couples and reading their intimate declarations of love and dedication and voluntary relinquishment of privacy. The work unfolds as a slow continuous scroll down, a comment on our everyday use of social media, and the increasing habit of observing the lives of others that, for some, has become almost an addiction. A long narrative based on the collected captions accompanies the visuals. The captions exist in their own right, as an autonomous ‘script’, while at the same time providing detailed insight into a global tendency that feeds on followers and likes. Finally, the video The Portal or Let’s stand still for the whales (2020), ponders, among other things, on the question of intimacy in the time of a pandemic.