Debra Solomon, artist and designer, described how during Skype video calls with her parents they seemed to not realise that their camera was on. This seemed to create an environment where her parents could do things they wouldn’t normally do: Solomon recalls sometimes seeing her father walking around with no clothes on. Solomon also reflects on the fact that these attitudes would not happen if she was physically present as “[we’re] not one of those families where everyone walks around naked and pees with the door open.”⁴⁸

The underlying common ground that interested and inspired me in these three examples seems to be the emotional investment that takes place when one doesn’t witness another physically. As earlier stated, I discovered these texts after composing Twitch_Plays_Max and being with You, in Unity, but the ideas are so relevant that it has changed the way I think of my previous work by adding new modes of analysis and lines of questioning, like a rotating prism that keeps on revealing new faces and refracting light in undiscovered ways.⁵¹ Twitch_Plays_Max and being with You, in Unity explored, in different angles, ideas of distanced-connection and togetherness mediated by the digital world. These perspectives can be linked to Solomon’s experiences with her family on a Skype call, Ophuis’ “fake memories” and Butler’s inquiry on whether we can truly connect with a disembodied entity on the screen. Some of the questions that arose from the intersection of my work and their words were: How much do people “let transpire” of their true selves when engaged in the online world?; Are their actions hindered or amplified by the knowledge that someone else is on the other side of the screen?; Do we need to change our behaviour and compromise in the online world in order to truly connect with someone who is not physically present? If we are indeed willing to compromise, is this proof that we can find value in connections made in the online world?; I cannot say that I have found answers to these questions. Perhaps, part of the beauty of it all is not reaching a conclusion at all, but simply letting oneself be inspired by the ambiguity and singularity of each situation. All I understand is that reflections on witnessing very easily lead to reflections on trust and embodiment within digital media. Nevejan writes:

In Non-places: an introduction to supermodernity (1995), Marc Augé describes a globalised world where distances become irrelevant to human existence. From railways to phone lines, from GPS to fibre-optic internet, the distance between human beings on opposite sides of the world keeps on shrinking. When speaking about globalisation, (intimately connected to McLuhan’s “global village”), Marc Augé states that it “(...) corresponds to the extension over the whole surface of the planet of the so-called free market and the technological networks of communication and information; and on the other [hand] to what one might call planetary awareness or consciousness (…)”. Augé goes on saying that this “planetary awareness or consciousness” is itself divided in two parts: ecological awareness, that is, the awareness that as human beings we are part of a fragile (global) ecosystem which when tampered with can have disastrous consequences; and social awareness, or the broader consciousness of social injustices.⁵⁶ The Corona Pandemic, the murder of George Floyd, the return to power of the Taliban in Afghanistan, the floods in Pakistan, the murder of Mahsa Amini in Iran, Putin’s war in Ukraine… these events all sparked international outrage and feelings of sympathy on a global scale. But when it comes to empathy, there’s a limit to how much of it I can feel in my body, since it needs to share space with sadness and sorrow. This is representative of the crisis in empathy that Turkle writes and speaks about. Technology seems to have made us numb not because of itself (like Marshall McLuhan writes) but due to what you gain access to.

The accelerated nature of modern human living has also created an increased difficulty in identity building. Curator Omar Kholeif describes the modern world as an age of ADHD. They write that we live “in a constant state of seeking out new forms of stimulation”.⁵⁷ Turkle notes, although, the importance of moments of boredom and solitude by remarking that these are conducive to assimilating information about the world around us and the world within ourselves. She worries that these moments have become something that we actively avoid.⁵⁸ In her talk, entitled “Identity in a Cyber World” at the University of California, Turkle notes that when we are having a moment of boredom and to avoid it we pick up our phones “it is no longer a tool.”⁵⁹ We use electronic gadgets to “remove ourselves from our grief or from our reverie”.⁶⁰ To me, this seems to lead to a lack of patience when engaging in flesh-and-bone conversations. Perhaps, we expect that conversations in real life should be as accelerated, efficient, and informative as the digital world, and when this isn’t true we get the feeling that we are wasting our time on pointless and uneventful moments of exchange that would be better spent doing something else. Boredom has no place in the accelerated lives of the human of the age of information.

And yet, despite all the “negative” outcomes a digitalised world has brought, I am - we all are, dare I say - still able to find value on online platforms. Perhaps my own Queerness, and how it relates to these ideas, hasn’t been very present in this paper, but in

“When not sharing time or space, when not having the possibilities to physically touch and intervene, can we be witness to each other?”⁴⁰

In my second year as a student of the Royal Conservatoire, I took the inspiring class “Networked Music and Scores”, headed by Anne La Berge and Rebekah Wilson. The focus of this class was the use of network technology to design an interactive music piece. In one of the sessions, the researcher, designer, and policymaker Caroline Nevejan was a guest lecturer. Her work has focused since the 80s on networked societies and digital culture.⁴¹ The question quoted above, from her book Witnessing you, has been ringing in my head for 3 years now, and even though I read it after creating Twitch_Plays_Max, its meaning seems to have back-propagated through time, almost fully recontextualizing the piece itself: indeed the piece was created to be about connectivity within the framework of the Internet. However, with the idea of “witnessing when not there” in mind, I understood that there were greater conceptual ramifications of the main idea of the piece. What had been created as somewhat of an interesting internet based/pandemic-inspired gimmick developed into an exploration of ways of engaging with one another when our physical bodies cannot coexist in the same space. The piece became about embodying physicality in

a digital world. The title of the work being with You, in Unity is also an homage to the YUTPA framework, which Nevejan formulated when researching acts of witnessing through digital media - YUTPA being an acronym for “to be with You in Unity of Time, Place and Action”.

According to Nevejan, “being-witness-to-each-other” is how social structures are created and consolidated. By bearing witness to negotiations of truth and trust, humans take responsibility for their deeds. By witnessing, we become agents in a given context, even if it does not directly relate to us, and our choices are as much part of the situation as the active participants, “because a witness accepts a shared responsibility for what is said or will be done”. In other words, as witnesses, we can modify perspectives, change outcomes or even misinterpret and twist accounts of events.

“Being witness is the source for complex feelings like compassion, courage, solidarity, endurance and perseverance.”

In her book, Nevejan asked 13 artists to reflect on the question “What happens when one is witness to the other?”. The works presented in the book range from the most analog to the mildly technological. Three of these stood out for me:

Multi-disciplinary artist Martin Butler reflects on ideas of trust with strangers. He created a questionnaire with only two questions: “When would you trust a stranger?” and “How would you make a stranger trust you?”. He presented this questionnaire to 100 people, 50 he knew personally and the other 50 he had no relationship with. The answers were extremely varied but the answers from “Person 51” caught my attention. To the first question, Person 51 answered “Every day, just not every stranger”; To the second question, they answered “Trust can only be given, the stranger will choose”. Butler also describes his relationship with the platform Chatroulette.⁴⁹ He sees it as an intrusive platform which directly invites a stranger into a person’s private space but somehow preserves anonymity since the probability of being paired with the same person is very slim. Butler wonders if in this platform it is possible to create a bond with the stranger on the other side of the screen and how much it differs from meeting a stranger in a physical environment.⁵⁰

what follows the relationship between my identity and the topics at hand will become more intertwined. For now, I would like to nod to my writings in the Preface of this paper.

In my teenage years, I wasn’t able to engage with all facets of my personhood, due to the hostile environment I grew up in when it came to topics of Queerness. For this reason, I sought refuge on the internet. There, I was able to find online communities in which I felt more understood and was able to feel compassion and acceptance. Online, I was able to make contact with sides of me that were hidden and underdeveloped due to fear of public ostracisation. I yearned for the digital more than I yearned for the physical because I felt like the people there, even if disembodied, were witnessing me in the most real way possible. Looking back, Turkle’s preoccupations with social media as identity-development inhibitors and Augé’s anxieties due to information overload don’t seem to stand. If anything, I was thankful for the amount of information I was receiving on topics of identity and sometimes even felt like the people I had found on online communities were truer friends than those in real life.⁶¹ Now, at 24 years of age, I cannot say that I fully know myself, but I can recognise that by having my (first) Queer awakening in the online world its characteristics have “rubbed off” on me and how I perceive my identity and physical body. For now, I wish to step back and explain what I mean about the online world “rubbing off” on me.

a digital world. The title of the work being with You, in Unity is also a homage to the YUTPA framework, which Nevejan formulated when researching acts of witnessing through digital media - YUTPA being an acronym for “to be with You in Unity of Time, Place and Action”.⁴²

According to Nevejan, “being-witness-to-each-other” is how social structures are created and consolidated. By bearing witness to negotiations of truth and trust, humans take responsibility for their deeds. By witnessing, we become agents in a given context, even if it does not directly relate to us, and our choices are as much part of the situation as the active participants, “because a witness accepts a shared responsibility for what is said or will be done”.⁴³ In other words, as witnesses, we can modify perspectives, change outcomes or even misinterpret and twist accounts of events.

“Being witness is the source for complex feelings like compassion, courage, solidarity, endurance and perseverance.”⁴⁴

In her book, Nevejan asked 13 artists to reflect on the question “What happens when one is witness to the other?”. The works presented in the book range from the most analog to the mildly technological. Three of these stood out for me:

trust and embodiment within digital media. Nevejan writes:

“Ultimately, place is the beholder of human experience, because it’s where the physical body resides. The technology of networks is disembodied but network experience[s] can be embodied and have considerable impact on how people live and love.”⁵²

This culminated in Can we feel touch when we’re made of light, discussed later in this chapter.

But how does one bear witness in a digitalized society?  Once a very physical activity, witnessing needs now to be reshaped and rethought as 21st-century technology becomes ubiquitous and social relationships become increasingly device-oriented. Undeniably, digital media has shaped the way we communicate and interact with one another. Perhaps the medium is the message, after all…

The work of Sherry Turkle is extremely relevant to this matter. As a psychologist and writer, she has, since the 90s, studied the effects of social media on the creation and development of identity. She does not see herself as a Luddite or technological negativist but according to her, social media and new communications technology have created a crisis in empathy.⁵³ As human beings become surrounded by copious amounts of news and information, we have become unable to put ourselves in the shoes of others and witness their feelings.⁵⁴ I see this as a coping mechanism for the gift of “worldwide” knowledge, or at least the illusion of it.⁵⁵

Ronald Ophuis is a painter who creates fictitious scenes on canvas, most of them of suffering and victimisation. Though his scenes do not correspond directly to a real moment in time, the feeling they convey is very real. He compares this to a personal memory of the death of his younger brother, who passed away when Ophuis was 4. He writes that in his mind, he had two images of his brother’s passing, even though he was far too young to remember anything. Later on, Ophuis’ father discredits these memories as they did not correspond to reality at all.⁴⁵ Though these memories were not true, Ophuis says “the sentiments we have experienced are[.]”⁴⁶ He compares this to the feelings Catholics have towards the iconography of Jesus Christ present in places of worship. The congregation knows that is not Jesus himself but “a body double and still [they] believe in his suffering”.⁴⁷