Digital Prelude is an online sensorium featuring WeiXin Quek Chong’s video works together with photographic prints. The works explore material aesthetics and tactility as communicative tools within our post-internet age, challenging the role of art in a time of intense social milieu and the heightened digital mediation of our experience as social and physical beings.  The artist touches on themes of Otherness, skins and individual and collective self-care. 

 

 

An ASMR soundtrack is featured in the background- a textural sound-based stimulation and contemporary online phenomenon sought after largely to relieve stress.

There are echoes of other ‘skins’ within this digital environment - feet labouring beneath a latex sheet, gestures of disembodied hands that caress what they consume. An image of a mantid's translucent wing and the spectre of a silicone spill float beneath the video works.

 

Meanwhilst, towards the end of the sensorium is an image containing screenshots of an iPhone being thrown into lava.

 

As with ASMR, the online fetish for destroying technological gadgets referenced in this work is also part of a community-forming search for pleasure and perhaps even care - ways of finding, and forging, kinds of relief in the body of one's current existence.