Are we all here? Exploring Embodied Virtuality Today

ONCURATING Project Space, Zurich, Switzerland
Curator: Myriam Boutry, Maria Elena Garzoni, Arianna Guidi, Sofia Gkinko, Tetiana Kartasheva, Ronald Kolb, Anna Konstantinova, Leilani Lynch, Maria Mumtaz, Sarah Oberrauch, Ana Vujic
Artists: Alexandra Pfammatter, Katrin Niedermeier, Lauren Huret, Tammara Leites/Simon Senn, Olga Bushkova, Giorgia Piffaretti, Sandar Tun Tun, Marc Lee
https://oncurating-space.org/

OnCurating Project Space, Zurich

Are we all here? Exploring Embodied Virtuality Today highlights the discourses around connectivity and intimacy through the use of digital tools, from the beginnings of the internet in the early 1990s to its development in the following decades. With the onset of the current circumstances set by the COVID-19 pandemic, societies are – more than ever – confronted with (self-)isolation, loss of physical contact and singularisation in an increasing shift of social interactions into digital space. Conceived in this situation, the project has taken early net artworks from the 1990s and 2000s as an opportunity to explore our today’s changed behavior of closeness, intimacy and other relations with humans and non-humans through digital means.

Are we all here? Exploring Embodied Virtuality Today seeks to revisit the onset of net art and how it evolved as a tool to question virtual connectivity and digital intimacy without offering tangible solutions. In our post-Internet world, online space is an extension of our lived reality. Via websites, blogs, friend requests, and DM’s, we leave traces of our networked existence and evidence of virtual connectivity. Uniting artworks with life experiences, the exhibition leads visitors and users to question not only whether personal connections are possible online and it what form, but also the possible ramifications of our interconnectedness. Are these connections “authentic”? How are they sustained, accessed (and by whom), and how can they be mobilised once they exist?

Exhibited Artwork

Used to Be My Home Too

Real-time cartography

This experiment shows photos of animals, fungi and plants that are uploaded right now by unknown users to iNaturalist.org via mobile phone. On Google Earth, these are mapped at the exact location where they were photographed. In addition, taxonomically similar species that occurred in the same country and became extinct within the last 30 years are automatically added in real time via RedList.org. Used more …

Haus Konstruktiv, Zurich

G.MAP, Gwangju

CAFA Art Museum, Beijing

New Media Art Reflects the Coronavirus Pandemic, 24/7 Online

Interactive Net-Based Installation

Corona TV Bot The Corona TV Bot thematises and reflects the Coronavirus Pandemic through social media contributions. On hashtags like Coronavirus and COVID-19, the latest Twitter and YouTube news are interwoven into a wild TV show, 24/7 online. Images, tweets and videos flicker across the screen in real time in this net art project. Time-based resources that combine both worldwide professional more …

re:publica campus, Berlin

Railway Station, St. Moritz

C/O Berlin Foundation, Berlin