Internet Café
After finishing her bachelor in Illustration in the Netherlands, Monique decide to further her education in Sweden. She has broadened her practice from mostly drawing to include animation and video editing. Her work most often talks about the internet and data. It intrigues her how the digital world can have a big influence on the physical world in how it can influence people’s opinions.
Through her research into social networking services, she has found that there are also common social spaces; small scale and non-predatory spaces where people can gather digitally without being taken advantage of. She has also found out that these spaces exist in a loop of being built, appropriated and rebuilt again.
She focussed her artwork on the aspect of this looping cycle of building and rebuilding. She has tried to visualise this in the way the artwork was made. It started with drawing these digital common spaces. What do they look like? How would they look if they are destroyed? Or rebuilt? She drew animations of them and projected those onto an installation of five wooden sculptures of different sizes. These cubes are a visualisation of pixels or building blocks. Their function in the work is also to catch and distort the multiple projections. She then filmed those projections and projected that back onto the cubes. She filmed herself moving the cubes and projected that again. She also invited collaborators to move the cubes with her, and act out conflict or resolution.
The end result is a chaotic cycle of building and rebuilding.
