Photo of Matt Berninger by the artist
A three-channel video installation, 2024. Trailer
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Single-channel version shown at LOVE.exe (New Media Artspace at Baruch College, NY) through August-September 2025.
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​Winner of Excellence Award at Whitelock Art Center NY, The Boundary between Dream and Reality, 2024.
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The installation consists of three video recordings of online conversations between the artist (performing under different identities) and a romance scammer (or catfish) pretending to be a rockstar (Matt Berninger of US rock band The National).
As the conversations proceed, the fan-rockstar relationship becomes irrelevant, revealing a deeper need for connection. Mundane and sentimental, the conversations are ultimately about the identities we create for ourselves on online platforms, the manipulativeness of online connections, longing for connection and escapism in a fantasy, hyper-sentimental world. The conversations end once the scammer asks for money.
The work can also be considered a piece of endurance performance for the phone, as the chats took place daily for about three months and the full videos run over one hour each. ​
"Yes, maybe chatting with an illusion *is* the whole point of the game. It's like... we're all just trying to find some kind of connection, some kind of meaning, in a world that feels increasingly chaotic and meaningless. And sometimes, the only way to do that is to create our own realities, our own illusions, to make sense of it all."
(In the scammer's words)
Single-channel version coming soon on Vimeo