Digital representations have different potentialities and affordances from their origins. Some of them evolve into new objects and concepts completely detached from the original and inherently change our understanding of ourselves, and the world they represent.
Considering the pervasiveness of digitalization, how long can the original maintain its position? What happens when these representations become the original?
[DATUMS] consists of six projects that investigate the transformation and deformation of meanings, objects, and concepts such as time, memory archives, momentary failures, friendship, and self-identity in the digital sphere in their own unique ways.
Martina Menegon
Martina Menegon (she/her) is an Italian digital artist, curator, and educator based in Vienna. Exhibited internationally, Martina’s work experiments with new forms of performative and glitched self-portraiture to explore the contemporary self and its hybrid corporeality.
It Feels Like Home
“It feels like home” is an online intervention that uses the synthetic space of the browser as a stage to unfold an interactive, performative and generative virtual experience. Experimenting with the notion of time during a pandemic and isolation, “It feels like home” reflects on the site-specificity within the virtual as well as the offline spaces, while it goes through hourly and algorithmic transformations, becoming a performative process that continuously produces unexpected and unpredictable results that depends on each visitor’s offline time-zone. The work reveals the artist’s personal experience of the pandemic, locked inside and constantly online and how her notions of time, home and personal space felt in constant change and contradiction, helplessly transient.
“It feels like home” was commissioned by HeK (House of electronic Arts Basel) for the series of online artworks “HeK Net Works” and is now existing in the blockchain as editions of NFTs to collect.
Leandro Estrella
Leandro Estrella is an artist working and experimenting with a plurality of materials and media, tending towards new technologies, which adds to their artworks. its artistic research is based on the paradoxical relationship between creative destruction and destructive creation, articulated with other subjects such as time and memory.
sTIME
sTIME is an ongoing project in which time and subjectivity are placed in contrast with the aid of custom software; the artificial time is "translated" into the user/performer's subjective time, subverting the standardized time system that governs contemporary society.
Ziyi Zhang
Ziyi Zhang is an interdisciplinary artist based in Chicago whose practice spans painting, installation, and interactive media. She recently received her MFA degree in Painting and Drawing from SAIC and received her BFA degree from Washington University in St. Louis in 2021.
Family Photo Album
Ziyi Zhang’s Family Photo Album (FPA) (2023) is an interactive, browser-based work of art that explores the artist’s “bestie,” a Chinese international student who studies art in America. Bestie eventually abandons her art and leaves behind a body of work revealing her collective family memories. The result is a stunning exploration of notions of truth, cultural and generational disconnect, and the relationship between social class and art.
Swaeny Nina Kersaan
Swaeny Nina would jokingly profile herself as a bitterbal (a Dutch meat-based snack, born in the Netherlands) in the Metaverse or a performing proxy AFK.
Proxy, This Is Not A Performance (Game)
Proxy, This Is Not A Performance is a project that engages with the creation of a digital self-representation, or avatar, as a model for the production and verification of identity. It forks ideas on digital identity as a lucrative good and metafiction through *identity tokens in Role Playing Games. The work is developed in collaboration with *players, and avatars, at various levels and stages online and on-site. Proxy, This Is Not A Performance references speculative fiction, (new/alternative) social (media) systems and the use of (blockchain) technology for/and (video) gaming. The avatar's value might develop over time. Play(ers) equip tokens that confirm their identity play, are decoupled from their platform, redistributed and played upon by new players. This is not a performance, but a game.
Cecilia Vidal Colls
Cecilia Vidal Colls (b.1994) is from Puerto Rico and currently lives in Brooklyn. She graduated from the Maryland Institute College of Art in 2017 with a BFA in Interdisciplinary Sculpture. Her work borrows from historic narratives and imagery to explore ideas of devotion, community and the timeless pursuit of utopia.
to whom much is expected, much is tested
On August 9, 1995, the beloved lead singer of the band the Grateful Dead, Jerry Garcia,
passed away. The internet became a place for deadheads to convene from all over the world, and mourn. Web page memorials dedicated to Jerry began sprouting up, as well as poetry inspired by the Dead. The internet also became a place for former and current hippies to preserve and share the hippie aesthetic and lifestyle while utilizing early computer graphics to communicate the vibe.These cyber-hippies were some of the first bloggers and explorers of a new world of HTML and website building.
The mythologist and scholar Joseph Campbell witnessed a Grateful Dead concert and described what he saw as reminiscent of ancient Dionysian festivals, a continuation of the ritual as a form of connection that he studied in ancient societies.“This is more than music,” he told his audience during his 1986 symposium “Ritual and Rapture, from Dionysus to the Grateful Dead”. “It turns something on in here [the heart]. And what it turns on is life energy. This is Dionysus talking through these kids. It doesn't matter what the name of the god is, or whether it's a rock group or a clergy,” he concluded. “It's somehow hitting that chord of realization of the unity of God in you all.”
This website was made as an interactive homage to the cyber-hippie aesthetic and culture, and acts as an archive (click on "links") of what an idealized attempt at early internet utopia, connection and community used to look like. ScarletBegonias.net houses a poetry project (click on "poems") entitled "To whom much is expected, much is tested". This series of poems reference the Orphic Hymns, BACCHAE by Euripedes, Matthew Arnold's poem Bacchanalia, as well as Joni Mitchell and the Grateful Dead in an attempt to show the timeless nature of devotion, community, sisterhood and brotherhood.
Ulises Berra
Mexican conceptual artist, he has more than 30 exhibitions, among which stand out: the Sixth Nodos CCS Video Art Festival at the; The Third International Biennial of Visual Arts of Asunción Paraguay; The #00 Havana Biennial ; The Seventh International Biennial of University Visual Art; "Confinement" of the Kiosko Galeria, among others.
Fiaskoh!
What to do with the archives that have been rejected from some art call? What treatment is given to those projects and portfolios? Based on these questions and the accumulation of failed files, Fiaskoh! emerges, an exercise in digital decomposition, carried out in two stages. In the first, some pages of the rejected portfolios were taken, where the original image works as a remnant of the totality of their intention. In the second stage, the series continues, but this time, involving some certificates, recognitions and honorable mentions of participation, in which the same method of digital decomposition was used, only now any recognizable reference has disappeared, configuring itself as an abstract entity.
Under these considerations, this visual essay reflects first on failure and then on meritocracy as tangential processes to the notion of work —this from its accumulation and redistribution in the field of image production. In this way they have become NFT's, which, from speculation, resizes the semantics with which these images were originally made.