Rupture, the passion market: why love is not fashionable (1998), Mix media interactive installation: 2 digital paintings and 1 neon, 12 postcards and an interactive CD-ROM

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The interactive artwork: Rupture, the passion market why love is not fashionable (1998)
After several years working in multimedia as an artist and a communication designer, I created on my own the installation Rupture, passions market because love is not fashionable (1998-99). I intended to question the illusion often adopted in advertising discourses. In contemporary society, love speech is only used as a creation of images and slogans, it has long since ceased to be the expression of feelings and it is installed in our minds as a projection of something possible but never feasible (Montreynaud 1998). In the passion market, "the other" is always overshadowed by the awareness that there are many "others" and that, therefore, we have no time to waste. The illusion promoted by this awareness of an excess of supply "from the other" creates a state of entropy in which the subject no longer has the capacity to choose, to act, and starts to live only in function of its gallery of possibilities, alone and dispersed. In 1998 two digital paintings and a neon, 12 graphical postcards, and a CD-ROM were created as an installation to highlight this concept. Together the work illustrated a narrative plot that is subdivided (on the CD-ROM) into three parallel stories, possible fictions around meetings, separations, and ruptures.
At the beginning of the CD-ROM the player of the interface can find a story written by the French artist Sophie Calle in her 1994 book True Stories [Des Histoires Vraies]. Throughout the work, the player must answer a questionnaire, which, like the women's magazines that proliferate in the passion market, will define fate at the end of the trip, prompting the player to read some concepts from the A Lover's Discourse: Fragments [Fragments d'un discours amoureux 1987] book by Roland Barthes. Thus, the interlocutor is confronted with three possible paths through a game of questions/answers and forwarded to an ending also divided into three different solutions. Player profile is then defined by one of the final stories in which we can hear a possible account of what happened to a certain female character. The final confrontation with a real account offers the player a presupposed solution to previous answers, that is, it is the path taken by the participant that becomes decisive for the final "card".
The project intention was meant to highlight the strangeness of this jumping between "fragments of the loving speech" which, when transported to a new technology, the CD-ROM, acquire through its decontextualization a fictional character of a children's game, just like any lover, players also find themselves in this virtual world, fragmented, incomplete and meaningless... because any information they decide to obtain involves them in an increasingly complex web. A collection of Alfred Hitchcock movies and actresses were depicted in warm colours and pixelated environments.
I programmed the CD-ROM in Lingo, recorded women testimonies, and mix them with interactive sounds and images. Players can hear stories, about their love lives and affairs, from three different women, can read fragments, jump between images, and hear sounds in an intertextuality fashion.
The installation was showed in some European festivals, museums, and galleries in Portugal and abroad. It was also part of my work in progress case study for the multimedia lab in Kent, England (1999), and latter it was bought by a Portuguese art collector, António Cachola.
The twelve postcards were not sold, they are digital compositions or variations around the same theme.
Here’s a list of the festivals where the installation or part of it were presented: Bandits-mages, Multimedia International Students Festival, Bourges/France, 2001; Medi@terra 2000, International Art and Technology Festival, Athens, Greece, 2000; Arco 2000, Meiac Virtual Gallery, Madrid 2000; Portuguese Art, Years 80-90, António Cachola Private Collection, Museu Estremenho e Ibero-americano de Arte Contemporânea, Meiac, Badajoz 1999; Multimedia labs sellection, Bore place, Kent, England 1999; Bienalle dei Giovani Artisti dell’Europa e del Mediterraneo, Visioni di Futuro, Roma, 1999; Romarias, 1st International Video Festival, Lisbon, 1999; National Young Creators Show, Aveiro 1998.