The Project
Virtual Reality:
Inside our virtual space, we bring attention to five examples of physical-digital relationships: a digital camera with film, an increasingly obsolete medium, flowing through it, which highlights the evolution of photography mediums; the rotary phone, which no longer has its physical spinning dial, depicting the loss of physical feedback from an already disembodied form of communication; a canvas with developing images inspired by the AI art tool, Midjourney, accompanied by text prompts on the painters palette; a giant robot hand holding a paintbrush, which illustrates the lack of human touch in automated painting; and lastly, a stack of hand-written letters being held up by factory-made magnets, juxtaposing the abundance of with the lack of personality in these two forms of text. As we bring physical objects into the digital space via photogrammetric scans, we expose the characteristic qualities of both physical and digital media. The physical space takes place as a small harmless tree with physical books topped with a kindle - the true enmeshment of digital and physical media.
These five examples are tied together by the tree that stands tall in the middle of the space, surrounded by physical books and the cloud that hovers overhead. The tree is a reference to the natural materials that give origin to all physical objects, yet its placement in a virtual space strips it of its materiality. The cloud above the tree further emphasizes the immateriality of digital-age media. Physical media, which was once as prevailing as the roots that branch throughout our ground and the clouds that flow in the air we breathe, is now forced to evolve, to adapt, perhaps be forgotten, but most importantly to share a space with its digital successors. This collection of digitized physical objects poses the question of how we might move through a world that increasingly merges the physical and the digital. What will we explore, adopt, forget, revisit, and learn?