refresh is an audio-visual installation exploring how the Internet’s gestural experience has shaped the way we behave and consume. We trade our time, attention and data for simplicity and convenience, while powering up exploitative and damaging business models. refresh is displayed as a speculative wellbeing station to heal from this understanding – a break from endless consumption through a meditative session, unlocked by the pull-to-refresh gesture. However, the wellbeing content displayed appears to reproduce familiar patterns to keep us hooked, as the gesture become more and more entrancing. Yet, it’s the only way to soothe ourselves down and find rationality.

First conceptualised during the artist’s residency at Rua Red part of the European Connections in Digital Art (EUCIDA) programme in September 2019.

Virginie Tan is an artist and designer based in London. Her practice is anchored within the dynamics of technology and society, between the technological sublime and the daze it puts us through. She works across the physical and the virtual, with elements of interactivity, video, sound and poetry. She graduated from the MA Interaction Design at London College of Communication, University of the Arts London in 2017. She has exhibited at Christie’s, Ars Electronica and The Wrong Biennale, and has been invited to residencies at Villa Noailles in Hyères and Villa Médicis in Rome.