At the beginning of the year, I came across HERVISIONS - a curatorial agency that works with artists working in primarily digital media (including video, game design, and virtual reality among other things). As described on their website: HERVISIONS is a femme focused curatorial agency facilitating online and offline experiences and collaborations with partners to research and produce innovative commissions, exhibitions and events with a strong focus on the intersection of art, technology and culture. Because of the field the agency operates in, their website and social media pages have become a common way for me to keep up with projects from many of the artists whose methodologies and work I admire operating in the new media and digital media scene.
Post Digital Landscapes, a recent exhibition coordinated as part of the Madrid Urban Digital Arts festival, explores the concept of the landscape from a post-digital perspective, and featured works from several of the artists that I had begun looking at last year as part of my EOY research: Lauren Moffatt, and the artist duo Baum & Leahy.
Post-digital describes a world where emerging digital technologies are no longer simply being explores but are a standard part of daily life. In an artistic context, it describes an attitude that is more concerned with being human than with being digital - "where technology and society advances beyond digital limitations" to achieve a totally fluid combined, seamless multi-media reality free from perceivable digitality (pixels, noise, etc.). Postdigital is concerned with the changing relationships humans have with digital technologies and art forms. In a curatorial statement written for Post Digital Landscapes, HERVISIONS agency writes: "landscape is, by etymological definition, a part of a territory that can be observed from a certain place. This implicitly names the existence of two antagonists: someone who looks and something that is looked at. Landscape is also one of the most important pictorial genres in the History of Art, with infinite works, techniques and authors who have attempted to encapsulate the territory, the eco-political relations that construct it and its inhabitants over time. These landscapes require an observer, but also a 'creative someone'...In our post-digital society we need to address the relations between digital, biological and cultural systems, between virtual and physical spaces, between the virtual and physical space, between technological and tactile experiences, between virtual and augmented reality, between roots and globalisation, between autoethnography and community narrative. In this context, we are looking for works that explore the creation of new post-digital landscapes." To specify the difference between traditional landscapes vs. digital landscapes in art, the agency suggests that "in contrast to the pictorial landscape, the digital landscape is ubiquitous. It can be in one or thousands of places at once. Its territory is 'the cloud'. Its creation can be individual or collective. These landscapes do not depend on gravity or physical forces that manipulate it, but on the code that constructs it. Digital art opens up infinite possibilities to create new landscapes in perpetual transformation, either present or future, either real or imagined. It opens windows to other worlds to explore not only aesthetically, but also politically and socially, all the spaces we inhabit.
While landscape has not been a focus or interest for me in my practice, I think there are relevant parallels between the idea of a digital landscape and a personal or organic ecology, and relates to the focus on the flux between self and environment that I want to continue to explore. The rhizomatic nature of digital spaces is something curious to me, although not a direct focus topic-wise, following on from exploring theories around expanded knowledge and cognition last year (see Jondi Keane in Carnal Knowledge: Towards a New Materialism through the Arts).
Lauren Moffatt is an Australian artist, living and working between Berlin and Valencia, whose practice sits in the field of video, performance, digital technology, and immersive installation. Moffatt's work frequently explores the connection, friction and paradoxes that exist between virtual and physical reality, and is often presented through multiple forms - video and immersive virtual reality installations being some of the most common in recent years.
I came across Moffatt's work while working on Surface Tension last year - I was interested in finding other artists who were exploring the use of real-world and digital imagery in creating hybrid worlds and narratives. Moffatt's work The Unbinding at the time was part of the Post Digital Landscapes exhibition organised by HERVISIONS.
The Unbinding (2014), a looped 3D digital video work, features a character exploring a world that, like themselves, is created from fragments of archived images and video footage. Each of the character's features change with her movements, and the environment is built from a jumble of constantly shifting visual imagery - inspired in part by Philip K. Dick's "scramble suits", science fiction (time machines and loops in particular), and cubist portraiture. The work overall offers us a view of how digital technology stores, shapes and forms the world we occupy (be it on- or off-line), and questions how we construct the realities we inhabit through different media. (video link below)
Recently, Moffatt's practice has branched into more virtual reality work - her pieces seem to incorporate a combination of photogrammetry and scanning, video, photography, digital sculpting, sound and installation. To the left is a segment of Flowers for Suzanne Clair (2020), a work that uses photogrammetry, digital sculpture and rendered video to explore the fictional ecosystem described in JG Ballard's novel, The Crystal World:
In 1966, JG Ballard writes ‘The Crystal World’. His fourth novel tells the journey of Edward Sanders, a physician invited to a small outpost in the interior of Africa. Finding the roadways blocked, he takes to the river, and embarks on a frightening journey through a strange petrified forest whose area expands daily, affecting not only the physical environment but also its inhabitants. Trees are metamorphosed into enormous jewels. Crocodiles encased in second glittering skins lurch down the river. Pythons with huge blind gemstone eyes rear in heraldic poses. Fearing this transformation as a herald of the apocalypse, most flee the area in terror, afraid to face a catastrophe they cannot understand. But some, like his peer doctor Suzanne Clair, are dazzled and strangely entranced, remain to drift through this dreamworld forest..."‘Flowers for Suzanne Clair’ wants to rewrite Suzanne’s story by building this fictional 1960s forest imagining in her vision. By making this tribute it hopes to connect with this point in the past, when our current trouble was beginning to become apparent.
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This mirrors the work of theorist Donna Haraway in her work 'Staying with the Trouble'. Haraway writes that "practicing new forms of storytelling to strategise alternative futures", and suggests that humans are not the central subject in our lives but part of a deeply interconnected web of existence, symbiotic relationships and ecology. Through storytelling, Haraway states that we can "create attachments with other beings, like in the string figure game of cat’s cradle where two parties must cooperate in order to tell the story through forms in the string", something Moffatt visualises in this work.
Amanda Baum & Rose Leahy are a creative duo who work primarily in interactive installation. Much like the artist duo Semiconductor, they collaborate with experts across multiple scientific disciplines including microbiology, quantum computer science, and architecture, to create works that turn data and knowledge into a tactile, participatory experience. Through their vibrant and interactive installations and the playful and speculative storytelling that takes place within them, their work allows viewers to experience a closeness to alternative or imperceivable realities.
The work Sensory Cellumonials features in the Post Digital Landscapes exhibition and is made up of five 6-8 minute videos with audio (spoken word and ambient music) that the duo describes as "meditative ceremonies" that explore the body's cellular biology in a fantastical way:
"The work [guides] you into your inner cellular sensorium: Through the domes dotted with taste buds on the tongue, the swaying temples in the ear canals, the furry forests in the nose, the sensitive soft valleys in the skin and the layers of crystalline refraction through the eyeballs and beyond. Each journey is guided by Our Living Cellular Kin (Olcks) – guardians of the five human senses and connected to the five kin-doms of life. They welcome us into their cellular habitats – across the geographies of our bodies – where genes, proteins and synaptic signalling weaves the tissue of us and the world, and reveals the vast interconnectedness of these living, cellular landscapes." The work is available through Google Chrome (link in name) and at the end of each video viewers can share their experiences, the data from which is gathered to create a generative map of perspectives on cellular biology research - allowing viewers to contribute to the digital web of knowledge surrounding the work directly and extending its impact beyond the experience of the installation.
What interests me about these artists and their practice is not only their use of new media, but the way they centre different perspectives in these works. Baum & Leah imagine and reenvision worlds that draw on the reality of the human body and its senses, creating characters based around these senses and vibrant audiovisual landscapes that allow the viewer to reflect on these things and experience them through new eyes rather than purely scientific rhetoric or data; while Lauren Moffatt utilises digital film, AI, 3D rendering and photogrammetry to create hybrid spaces that explore the inner worlds and perspectives of the characters that inhabit or inspire them.
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