refresh is an audio-visual interactive installation exploring how the Internet’s gestural experience have shaped the ways we behave and consume. We trade our time, attention and data for simplicity and convenience, while powering up exploitative and damaging business models. refresh is displayed as a speculative wellbeing station to heal from this understanding – a break from endless consumption through a meditative session, unlocked by the pull-to-refresh gesture. This is activated by a LeapMotion sensor which can track hand movement, that has to be moving up and down to "refresh" the installation. However, the wellbeing content displayed appears to reproduce familiar patterns to keep us hooked, as the gesture become more and more entrancing. Yet, it’s the only way to soothe ourselves down and find rationality.

Artist bio

Virginie Tan (b. 1992, Saint-Denis) is an artist and designer based in London, French born of Sino-Cambodian descent. She works across the virtual and the physical, blending elements of interactivity, video, sound and poetry. Her practice explores the dynamics of technology and its impact on humans’ behaviours, between the technological sublime and the daze it puts us through. The economy of attention, viral media culture, intimacy and identity versus surveillance and racial biases, overlooked by the politics of digital interfaces – are topics she translates through her own imaginary of visuals, sounds and words. She aims to highlight the functional and dysfunctional of technology’s usage, by creating a time-space prone to slowness – opposed to the digital exponential speed, almost as to heal us from it. She has exhibited at Christie’s, RuptureXIBIT, Hypha, and has been invited to discoveries residencies at Villa Medici in Rome and Villa Noailles in Hyères. She graduated in 2017 from the MA Interaction Design at UAL - London College of Communication