melting reality
proposes online existence as ontologically continuous with physical life: a transmedia installation where synthetic femininity, technological embodiment, and the desiring-machine of the networked body pour through concrete, foam, and rose-pink light into the space of the real.
2023
in collaboration with Lea Neckel
in collaboration with Lea Neckel
exhibited at:
Vienna (AT): Das Weisse Haus
"THE REAL WEIRD MAGIC PICTURE SHOW"
curated by Barbara Horvath
photos by Xenia Snapiro
Two concrete forms rest on the floor in an abstracted double curvature, a 69 configuration that operates as a diagram of balance, a structure that refuses to resolve its tension into hierarchy. A soft, plush chain connects them: the hard and the yielding flowing into each other, co-constituting rather than opposing. Pink LED light pools around this small island of matter, and above it, inflatable sculptural bodies float in suspension, their buoyancy a formal argument for a different gravitational order.
A video poem, superimposed over a rain of pink rose petals falling in a continuous present-tense shower. Rose petals hang also in the physical air of the room, suspended as if drifting in the current between screen and body. Pink fog thickens the atmosphere, making the room feel permeable, as though reality itself has become a medium you can breathe through.
melting reality proceeds from the proposition that the body online is ontologically echoed to the body in physical space: the virtual does not hover above the real as its pale supplement, but pours into it like a waterfall into a basin already full, overflowing, soaking the material world in its intensities. Drawing on the xenofeminist insistence that gender, desire, and embodiment are sites of active technological intervention rather than fixed ground, the installation approaches synthetic femininity as a productive force rather than a simulation of the natural. What the network produces when desire circulates freely through it, when the codes soften and the boundaries between states of matter begin to leak, is a new mode of corporeal existence: luminous, distributed, refusing the singular location assigned by the body in normative space.
The poem voices this proposition directly, as an affirmative interrogation: what form do you take when the physics are optional? What do you choose when you are free of the constraints that organized your flesh in the old world? I just want to exist as a purple light floating around. The not-yet that is already pressing against the membrane of the present, the potentiality embedded in living bodies that desiring-production assembles toward a world still arriving. The machinic desire that flows through connective syntheses finds its libidinal outlet here: desire producing reality, not describing it, generating the conditions for bodies that exceed inherited form.
The work's material logic mirrors its conceptual proposition. Hardness softened by touch. Weight suspended in foam. Petals kept aloft by the warmth of the projector's light. The concrete sculptures carry the marks of solidity and permanence, the institutional weight of the built environment, and the chain that connects them is plush, yielding, the material of care and comfort. The technological reengineering of the conditions under which bodies are produced and organized, finds its sensory analogue in the installation's formal structure: the hard does not dissolve but is transformed through relation, softened by contact with what holds it.
The installation constitutes a spring beneath the floor of the ordinary. A pressure of futurity building within the encounter between bodies, networks, and material forms, bubbling up through pink light and suspended flowers into the room where you are standing, now, already inside the world it describes.
A video poem, superimposed over a rain of pink rose petals falling in a continuous present-tense shower. Rose petals hang also in the physical air of the room, suspended as if drifting in the current between screen and body. Pink fog thickens the atmosphere, making the room feel permeable, as though reality itself has become a medium you can breathe through.
melting reality proceeds from the proposition that the body online is ontologically echoed to the body in physical space: the virtual does not hover above the real as its pale supplement, but pours into it like a waterfall into a basin already full, overflowing, soaking the material world in its intensities. Drawing on the xenofeminist insistence that gender, desire, and embodiment are sites of active technological intervention rather than fixed ground, the installation approaches synthetic femininity as a productive force rather than a simulation of the natural. What the network produces when desire circulates freely through it, when the codes soften and the boundaries between states of matter begin to leak, is a new mode of corporeal existence: luminous, distributed, refusing the singular location assigned by the body in normative space.
The poem voices this proposition directly, as an affirmative interrogation: what form do you take when the physics are optional? What do you choose when you are free of the constraints that organized your flesh in the old world? I just want to exist as a purple light floating around. The not-yet that is already pressing against the membrane of the present, the potentiality embedded in living bodies that desiring-production assembles toward a world still arriving. The machinic desire that flows through connective syntheses finds its libidinal outlet here: desire producing reality, not describing it, generating the conditions for bodies that exceed inherited form.
The work's material logic mirrors its conceptual proposition. Hardness softened by touch. Weight suspended in foam. Petals kept aloft by the warmth of the projector's light. The concrete sculptures carry the marks of solidity and permanence, the institutional weight of the built environment, and the chain that connects them is plush, yielding, the material of care and comfort. The technological reengineering of the conditions under which bodies are produced and organized, finds its sensory analogue in the installation's formal structure: the hard does not dissolve but is transformed through relation, softened by contact with what holds it.
The installation constitutes a spring beneath the floor of the ordinary. A pressure of futurity building within the encounter between bodies, networks, and material forms, bubbling up through pink light and suspended flowers into the room where you are standing, now, already inside the world it describes.
