IDLE
IDLE is an interdisciplinary exhibition and performance project exploring queer adolescence, isolation, digital intimacy and the search for belonging.
The project emerged from a shared experience of growing up queer in small, heteronormative towns, where visible queer role models were limited and self expression was often shaped by social expectation, distance and silence.
In that absence, digital spaces became important places of discovery and connection. The internet offered both refuge and possibility, a space in which identity could be explored, relationships imagined and a sense of community formed beyond the immediate physical environment.
At the centre of IDLE is the screen, a site of both intimacy and separation.
The exhibition considers how digital technologies allow people to connect while remaining physically apart, creating relationships that can feel immediate and personal while still being mediated by distance. This tension between online presence and bodily absence runs throughout the work.
Performance & Space
The project emerged from a shared experience of growing up queer in small, heteronormative towns, where visible queer role models were limited and self expression was often shaped by social expectation, distance and silence.
In that absence, digital spaces became important places of discovery and connection. The internet offered both refuge and possibility, a space in which identity could be explored, relationships imagined and a sense of community formed beyond the immediate physical environment.
At the centre of IDLE is the screen, a site of both intimacy and separation.
The exhibition considers how digital technologies allow people to connect while remaining physically apart, creating relationships that can feel immediate and personal while still being mediated by distance. This tension between online presence and bodily absence runs throughout the work.
Visual Work
Visual artist Abi Birkinshaw contributed a series of digital drawings and experimental monoprints based on photographs of Robert Oros' friends and former partners sourced through social media.
Although these individuals were personally unknown to the artist, the repeated process of observing, drawing and printing their images created an unexpected form of intimacy.
The works explore the nature of parasocial connection, the feeling of knowing someone through prolonged digital observation without any direct relationship.
Installed with deliberate distance between them, the images create a stark and almost clinical environment. Vulnerable and everyday depictions of bodies contrast with the severity of the exhibition space, reinforcing the tension between intimacy and detachment.
Artistic Approach
IDLE brings together performance, sound, visual art and spatial installation to examine how queer identity can be formed through both physical absence and digital proximity.
Rather than presenting technology simply as a source of isolation, the project considers its contradictions. It can separate and connect, conceal and reveal, distance and sustain.
At its centre is a question of how people learn to recognise themselves when the communities, identities or relationships they are searching for are not immediately visible around them.
IDLE becomes a space for witnessing those contradictions, a reflection on isolation, digital belonging and the ways queer identity can be imagined and sustained across distance.
“I found myself getting quite emotional because I never had that experience when I was younger, so to get pulled in to a whole disconnected and disruptive atmosphere was quite an eye opener for me. It was a fantastic experience although it made me feel a bit guilty that I never experienced that myself and how so many others were alone. Powerful stuff.”
