Connected to somebody 





Connected to somebody is the first of two projects in which I have attempted to investigate the universe of social relationships at the time of the so-called digital age.
The project was born as a response to a sense of extreme inadequacy facing the expanding system of online relationships that, entertained either between friends or among strangers, tend to be characterised by a certain volatility and abstraction rather than what once was the ‘physicality’ of the face to face exchanges, with all its advantages and all its flaws.

Chatroulette is a video-chat that, more than others, allows its users to give vent to their hidden instincts. Anyone who owns a webcam, once logged in, is projected into the reality of a person - chosen completely randomly - and can decide whether to watch, to chat, to talk or simply to "next" the other.
Websites like Chatroulette have spread like wildfire on the web, in various forms and shades, and have given rise to a new global tribe who finds in this system of disposable relationships a new and easier way to establish a contact, insult someone, or have a sexual intercourse. As external observers, usually, the first feeling is to be ended up in a hellhole where the voyeurism and narcissism that give shape to the new era of "social" networks find their highest expression. At a closer look, however, the composition of this tribe reveals itself as much more heterogeneous. Many people use the chat-room to share feelings and moods that are confessable only to the ones they will never meet: crying, laughing, displaying their own weaknesses or miseries. The instincts of Chatroulette users – the need to spy on the neighbour's grass and flaunt their own, to excel in something, to feel accepted, loved, attractive, to have a place, an island, where they do not have to account for anything to anyone - are actually desires which, to varying degrees, concern each of us.
Beyond the often-unutterable attitudes of the individual users, Chatroulette is a planetary social phenomenon, son of an era characterized by loss of identity, alienation and cultural heritage’s flattening, and therefore has to be read in its complexity.