Kid of the Internet

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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.

I read Kid of the internet and found it totally fascinating.
I was impressed by the breadth of Geo’s research and the information contained in the footnotes. But what hit me most forcefully was Jana the cow, the description of pre-postmodern Romania of the case of globally during her childhood; the fake originality of early social media pages; the wry, dour consciousness of the capture of her imagination by hyper capitalism I love the gap about the rich and poor in the experience of cities - the internet version of constant buzz and consumption.
I have never read someone express those ideas from the position of a subject before, so simple and clear.

- Chris Kraus author of Aliens and Anorexia and I Love Dick

Publisher
Onomatopee

Editors
Georgiana Cojocaru
Ollie Paterson

Graphic
Geo Barcan

Special thanks
Georgiana Cojocaru, Chris Kraus