While meeting up for the after-work beer on Teams felt like drowning in a sea of pixels breathing desperately for intimacy, Amalie Smith’s work Michanikos mediates the history of how Greek divers lost the control of their bodies due to new technology. Michanikos literally means ‘mechanical’, and is the name of a Greek folk dance, also called ‘The Sponge Diver Dance’. The dancer shakes as if he is suffering from decompression sickness, which sponge divers experienced when they were the first to use industrial diving suits in the mid-19th century. Smith’s artwork consists of a double projection with one video showing the contemporary dancer Sophia Mage interpreting ‘The Sponge Diver Dance.’ A motion capture suit tracks her movements and tranfers them to an animated diver standing on a virtual seabed on another screen. While the diver suit symbolizes the industrial revolution, the motion capture suit questions what sequelae will follow our next digital paradigm. Maybe it was digital decompression sickness I felt chatting with my co-workers during the quarantine?