Catalogue of the solo exhibition by the artist Roberto Winter, entitled Dopamine fast – Mínimo global, which was on show at Galeria da Boavista between 3 December 2020 and 28 February 2021. It includes reproductions of the works exhibited and texts by Caroline Campbell, Tobi Maier, Júlia Ayerbe, Roberto Winter and Denis Maksimov-Gupta, in addition to the reproduction of the text of the video work Flag of Convenience (2020).
“In Global minimum, the first traces of our future-to-come can also be seen to appear (albeit in physical form). You will note that at this point human conception could only model three-dimensional algorithmic processes such as differential equations. Much of this is implicit in the human brain of that era being hard-wired to notions of linear time, against which everything was judged (the connection with the infinite dimensional space of the quantum field had not yet been realised).”
-Caroline Campbell
“Dopamine fast – Mínimo global brings together a series of recent sound and sculptural installations, films, as well as text works. Together, this new body of works has been installed by Roberto Winter in an effort to test our abilities to distinguish between fiction and reality, and to confront the consequences brought to our psychological and physiological existence when interacting within the digital domains.”
-Tobi Maier
“Profiles which selectively conceal personal information in order to make a person seem more desirable are by no means strange or exceptional on social media, given that the nature of these apps is such that the more the user controls their image and the concept of themselves, the more successful they are. Reality and fiction end up dissolving in order to please the object of one’s desire.”
-Júlia Ayerbe
“Throughout the past years I’ve been trying to find ways to address, talk and think about abusive relationships, but I haven’t found a way to do it. That is the nature of these relationships: the narcissists’ love for who they think they are is beyond reason, beyond argumentation and impossible to confront directly because it becomes an essential part of their beings. In this relationship, the abuse is structuring, and codified by the self-alienated machine. Ultimately, it is perpetrated by a divided subject: the injunction of the confrontation between fear of irrelevance and vanity produces in them their own master.”
-Roberto Winter
“Before the impact of social media on politics in the Western world became apparent, Russia was already successfully experimenting with innovative approaches to management of political discourse. The aftermath of the turbulent period that followed the collapse of the Soviet Union set the stage for the building of Vladimir Putin’s regime, which became a laboratory for socio-political experimentation and engineering of political technology for the new epoch of virtual politics. In recent years, it has become apparent that the virtualisation of politics is now a global phenomenon”.
-Denis Maksimov-Gupta