Recital Hall is a short film made in collaboration with Elouan Le Bars. It's based on research into abandoned online spaces and the ghostly traces left behind by their former users. The project focuses on The Palace, a graphic chatroom popular in the late 1990s and early 2000s. This platform allowed users to create and decorate their own virtual “rooms”– custom-designed webpages that acted as social gathering spaces. Recital Hall takes the form of a pseudo-documentary, combining internet history with ideas from ghost stories and theories of haunting. The work recreates the aesthetic of The Palace by designing new backgrounds, assembling digital sets, and generating fictional ghost avatars who speak about the platform, its culture, and its disappearance. Through these conversations, the piece reflects on internet nostalgia and the emotional life of digital spaces long after their active use.

Recital Hall is an attempt to react to an increasing longing for the use of the internet before it was co-opted by platform capitalism.

"In Recital Hall, an avatar wanders aimlessly through the empty chat rooms and halls of the former online platform The Palace — once a lively gathering place for “vampires, scripters, and wizards.” Today, however, it feels characteristically deserted. To the sound of a melancholic melody, suffocating absence dissolves into a white mist in which the ghosts of former avatars occasionally flicker. Bruinen and Le Bars explore virtual nostalgia and fragmented storytelling, intertwining them with archival materials and insights gathered during their residency in Japan — a country where the boundaries of reality are known to dissolve. Like the spectres described by theorist and semiotician Roland Barthes, digital entities exist at the threshold of presence and absence, past and present, and thus exert a direct influence on our perception of the world."

Excerpt from curator Mariana Pecháčková’s text for home is where the haunt is, Gallery Kvalitář, Prague