Geo Barcan: Kid of the Internet

‘Kid of the internet’ is a collection of visual and written essays about living and growing up in late 2000s Romania. Autobiographical and at points fictional, the hybrid work follows the life-changing impact of the internet in the artist’s hometown and community. An embodied, local history of the world wide web in Eastern Europe.

As 21st-century networks started to dim onto the collapsed sky of failed utopias, an escapist deliverance through fibre connection became the norm for the post-communist youth. Infinitely recessive corridors in this gleamy nowhere space plugged one inside like the roving vortex of a dark star. But was this diamond blue web a caring womb or a sly trap?

Just like The Flying Man of Romanian mythology, the internet becomes an alluring incubus-like being who visits nubile girls at night, disturbing their sleep with rattling feelings and hypnotic thoughts – a seditious teenage demon in Y2K povera fashion. Against the dreamless exhaustion of working-class sleepers, coddled in communist austere architecture, a girl in her pyjamas gets to know that division, segregation and inequality are vectors that draw the world and refuse to die. Kid of the Internet is the story of technological abductors, failed utopias, deceitful promises and twisted becomings of age.

This formally dissident text where collage, found image, quotes, instant messages, love songs lyrics, and flash fiction meet traces how the internet mutates one’s sense of self bringing soft yet permanent transformations.’