When we long for the early internet as a free world, are we remembering a reality, or a myth that vanished early on? 

Recital Hall is a short film made in collaboration with the artist Megan Bruinen about the rise and fall of the pioneering online chatroom thepalace.net. The film reimagines the experience of the online structure through the eyes of a forgotten avatar, left behind after it was abandoned in the early 2000’s. Functioning as both subject and guide, the avatar recounts memories inspired by nostalgic testimonies from former users, fantastic stories about palaces and theories on digital communities. Recital Hall is an attempt to react to an increasing longing for the use of the internet before it was co-opted by platform capitalism.

Credits

Film by Elouan Le Bars & Megan Bruinen
Music – bdstf (Bastien Destephen)
Voice – Sophie Lindsay

With the support of Tenjiyama Art Studio (Sapporo, Japan) and Kvalitar Gallery (Prague, Czechia).

"In Recital Hall, an avatar wanders aimlessly through the empty chat rooms and halls of the former online platform The Palace — once a lively gathering place for “vampires, scripters, and wizards.” Today, however, it feels characteristically deserted. To the sound of a melancholic melody, suffocating absence dissolves into a white mist in which the ghosts of former avatars occasionally flicker. Bruinen and Le Bars explore virtual nostalgia and fragmented storytelling, intertwining them with archival materials and insights gathered during their residency in Japan — a country where the boundaries of reality are known to dissolve. Like the spectres described by theorist and semiotician Roland Barthes, digital entities exist at the threshold of presence and absence, past and present, and thus exert a direct influence on our perception of the world."

Excerpt from curator Mariana Pecháčková’s text for home is where the haunt is, Gallery Kvalitář, Prague