I recently came across the work of two artists who are examining the idea of landscape and space in relation to the realm of digital technology, and who are examining the boundaries and relationships between ourselves, the world and digital spaces. Digital memory and mediated experience are core themes in the two works discussed below.
Deborah Mora
Deborah Mora's practice explores symbiotic relationships between nature, culture and technology. Her work investigates ideas of memory, preservation, re-wilding and resilience, focusing on how natural processes, artefacts and myths can allow for different experiences of an often mediated world. Below is a segment of her project 0°N, 0°E, a digital video work that explores a constructed technological memoryscape of nature. The project is "an invitation to a collective, technologically mediated memory of nature". The landscape of nature is created from mediated images of the natural world - through Google images, maps, online images, videos, scans, and other pieces of digital information. In effect, "the cyber myth of Null Island is used to project how knowledge is generated when the only access to nature is hypermediated modality. Can our natural environments be preserved in a digital format? How does this format contribute to knowledge and experiences?"
I find Mora's use of hypermediacy (a style of visual representation whose goal is to remind the viewer of the medium) really interesting too - as a viewer I'm very conscious that I'm looking at a digital rendering of a natural landscape made out of different parts. It's not something I can consciously separate from the work as I experience it. Hypermediacy plays on our "desire for immediacy and transparent immediacy, making us hyper-conscious of our act of seeing (or gazing)". I was also surprised to learn through researching this work that Null Island is an actual place - although not an island or landmass, it's the site of the null coordinates that the work takes its name from; the site of a small weather buoy measuring geological data in the Atlantic ocean...
"When a file is uploaded to the internet, it suddenly becomes part of a cloud of non-identifiable objects. Especially when certain data are missing...it’s even harder to retrieve precise information about that object... I think that this says something about how we consume information digitally: many times, we don’t really know or care about the identity of this information, or if this information is authentic... Documentation of physical object and places occurs when we want to encapsulate a sort of knowledge of extend the memory of it. Most of the objects and files that are present in the work are sourced from scientists, archeologists, biologists that documented these objects for study and survey, and uploaded them online for free in order to make them available to their students or other professionals that can’t physically visit those places. As for them photographing, 3D scanning, sound recording are tools for research and documentation, for me they speak about the possibility of extending the lifetime of this objects in the digital format and preserving their memory. This is relevant nowadays when natural landscapes and artifacts are threatened by climate changes. It’s also interesting to see how different time scales are brought together: our human time which is the time we are able to observe things changing, the ‘slow’ geological time, through which environments and species form, and the hyper fast, internet ‘time’ where everything is constantly accessible. The Null Island is for me a timeless place where all these objects try to survive virtually, beyond material deterioration."
I think given the times and the fact that international (and often domestic) travel is off the cards for many of us, the idea of digitally traversing mythological data planes is pretty curious. I can see how Mora's work here would be relevant during the current pandemic and relates well to the feelings of both digital mediation and myth-building. When "real world" experiences are limited or restricted, digital realms and technology offer us new ways of exploring beyond physical space...
Snow Yunxue Fu Snow Yunxue Fu is a new media artist, curator, and assistant arts professor at NYU Tisch School of the Arts. Her practice investigates historical, post-photographic, philosophical, and painterly themes and the experience of the techno sublime, often through installation and 3D rendering works. Fu has a background in traditional Chinese and Western abstract painting and draws from the work of painters particularly interested in the experience of the sublime in nature throughout her practice. 3D simulation, AR (augmented reality) and XR (mixed reality) are common mediums utilised in the process. As a female Chinese American immigrant, Fu describes that she lives "an international dialogue and a felt betweenness, through which she investigates shared humanity through the lens of technology."
Liminality Liminoid was a two-month long solo exhibition featuring Fu’s artworks set within a corridor, reimagining Plato’s allegory of the cave through new media technology. Digital works present included VR, projections, and video installations. Much of Fu's practice has a philosophical underpinning, and its interesting to me seeing artists utilising new media to visualise these ideas...
Exhibition statement from Fu's website:
"Working primarily with 3D software, Fu creates scenes of experimental abstraction that translate the concept of liminality into the digital experience. The word liminal is often used to discuss the sublime within digital space and the VR experience, conjuring up notions of time, space, and perception, and echoing the experience of the sublime in nature. The word is borrowed from the field of anthropology, as anthropologist Victor Turner described as “the quality of ambiguity or disorientation that occurs in the middle stage of a rite of passage,” which “serves not only to identify the importance of in-between periods, but also to understand the human reactions to liminal experiences.”
Fu’s work draws parallels between the physical, virtual, metaphysical, and multi-dimensional, setting the viewer in a liminal space at the threshold of each in what Turner called “a period of scrutiny for central values and axioms.” Digital space and the VR experience is what Turner would later make a distinction for as a liminoid experience, differing from the liminal in that the liminal engages in an experience out of our control, while the liminoid is a choice, often relating to play. Liminoid, then, is a simulation of the liminal, as the techno sublime experienced through digital space is a simulation of the sublime in nature. Within a digital space, we are offered an encounter to reflect on our response to the simultaneously beautiful and overwhelming artifice of the techno-sublime."
I haven't come across the distinction between liminal and liminoid (would've been good to know last year!). Both this and Mora's ideas around hypermediacy are concepts I'm interested in learning more about...
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