Agora Phobia (Digitalis)

installation, performance | This edition of the work is produced especially for the exhibition "Sense of Safety" | Traveling since 2000 in city public spaces such as Amsterdam, Paris, New York, Berlin, the work is included in the Digital Canon of the Netherlands 1960-2000, a selection of 20 digital works. / 2000 / 2024

Karen Lancel and Hermen Maat are renowned artists and researchers based in Amsterdam. Their core practices elements involves creating intimate and empathetic connections through innovative aesthetic AI and public performances, encouraging people to reflect and connect in new, disrupted sensory ways.

What is a safe place for you? How would you describe an unsafe place? When and where do you feel isolated? How do you control your space?

Agora Phobia (Digitalis) is an interactive installation that investigates feelings and experiences of isolation, safety, and unsafety. Originally conceived in the early 2000s, during the rise of social media and the growing power of the Internet, it addressed virtual communication between people. Paradoxically, this form of communication both enhances social connections but also results in physical alienation and personal isolation. In this way, Digital domination impacts questions of safe spaces and personal control.

Agora Phobia (Digitalis) is a mobile monument for 'public isolation.' The project connects social experiences in both physical and virtual space creating a hybrid agora. It invites you into a semi-transparent, inflatable Isolation Pillar in which one feels safe within an intimate space; and at the same time, lacking social and physical control over the outside, one feels vulnerable. Participants together can anonymously share and create a data-archive of mental images and strategies for being (un)safe and isolated.

Today, over twenty years after the conception of the work, its display in Kharkiv opens up a new level and acquires an absolutely different reading. The work appears in its inverted version: the demand for safe cross-border communication becomes a relief for the audience in the situation of forced isolation imposed by the war.

Initially conceived as a critical reflection about the public and private sphere in a mediated society, today the work is exhibited in an a priori unsafe context. Agora Phobia (Digitalis) proposes hybrid communication-online from an inflatable, tactile, almost embodied spatial environment-as a safe space, critically reflecting on such connections as a last resort for social safety. The work proposes a safe haven for personal reflection amidst widespread unsafety within the protective walls of the YermilovCentre and the intensified shell of the Inflatable Isolation Pillar. This installation underscores the changing nature of safety and interaction, inviting visitors to find comfort and communication in a protected space.