post virtual garden
A site-responsive installation in which resin sculptures, iPhones, and LED light construct a post-virtual garden: the space after the virtual has overflowed into physical reality, where digital desire, online care, and embodied feeling pool together in a single luminous ecology, and IRL and URL bloom as one.
post virtual garden is a durational site specific installation project dealing with the merging of virtual and physical realities
installation
2019 - 2020
exhibited at:
London (UK): Austrian Cultural Forum „HYPERSURFACES“ curated by Nicole Tatschl and Caterina Avataneo
Salzburg (AT): Periscope „SUCH SOFTENING LOCK“
Jesteburg (DE): Kunstverein Jesteburg „What cheese are you? Video, Digitalisierung und Internet today“ curated by Malte Struck
Berlin (DE): Re:Publica 2020 Campus „Netzwerke“ curated by Enrique Torres
Wien (AT): Anatolia Schnitzel "*~post virtual garden~* " solo exhibition
Wien (AT): private location "flatconcert nr 5 - rosa"
Oberwart (AT): Offenes Haus Oberwart„30 Jahre OHO“
Chemnitz (GER): Begehung 2019 „Rausch“ 1 Month residency
London (UK): Austrian Cultural Forum „HYPERSURFACES“ curated by Nicole Tatschl and Caterina Avataneo
Salzburg (AT): Periscope „SUCH SOFTENING LOCK“
Jesteburg (DE): Kunstverein Jesteburg „What cheese are you? Video, Digitalisierung und Internet today“ curated by Malte Struck
Berlin (DE): Re:Publica 2020 Campus „Netzwerke“ curated by Enrique Torres
Wien (AT): Anatolia Schnitzel "*~post virtual garden~* " solo exhibition
Wien (AT): private location "flatconcert nr 5 - rosa"
Oberwart (AT): Offenes Haus Oberwart„30 Jahre OHO“
Chemnitz (GER): Begehung 2019 „Rausch“ 1 Month residency
PVG is a durational, site-responsive installation operating across resin sculptures, mobile phones, charging cables, LED lighting, and PVC prints. The work first emerged in Vienna and travelled through iterations at the Austrian Cultural Forum London ("Hypersurfaces"), Periscope Salzburg, Kunstverein Jesteburg, Re:Publica Berlin, Forward Festival Vienna, and Kunstraum Niederösterreich, among further sites, each iteration responding to and absorbing the specific spatial and cultural charge of its host environment.
The work takes as its operative premise what Baudrillard theorised as the hyperreal: the condition in which simulations of the real accrue a greater ontological density than the real itself. Post Virtual Garden proceeds beyond diagnosis, treating this condition as inhabitable terrain. The digital and the physical share a single ontological floor. Feelings generated in URL space are feelings; the desire that circulates through a feed is desire; the care invested in a curated online presence is care. This is the theoretical stake from which the installation flows: a Deleuzian and Guattarian insistence on desire as productive, as a force that assembles worlds rather than merely representing them, released from its confinement to the analogue body and allowed to run across all surfaces simultaneously.
The garden serves as the structuring metaphor. A garden is an ecology of intention, a space shaped by attentiveness, by the sustained direction of desire toward growth. The algorithmic feed operates by precisely this logic: what receives attention expands; what is watered, blooms. Resin sculptures in the forms of anthropomorphic, softened, computer-generated bodies anchor the space. From these forms, iPhones grow like flowers from stems. The LED field emits a neon pulse that functions as a kind of ambient notification, a permanent low-grade intensity, the digital always-on seeping into the physical as light. Charging cables trail as roots, as arteries, as connective tissue. The PVC prints surface additional layers of the image world, a Photoshopian stratigraphy in which no single layer dominates.
The virtual has overflowed. The glass has long been too full. It spills into the room as a waterfall, as a river, as a pressure that reorganises everything it contacts. Post Virtual Garden materialises the moment after that overflow: a post-virtual ecology in which IRL and URL are layers of one composite reality, superimposed, mutually constitutive, flowing into one another the way currents merge in open water. Dream-space, online-space, and physical-space lose their discrete edges; they become, in perception and in feeling, a single fluid medium. The installation gives this merged condition aesthetic form, inviting the viewer into an experience of immersion rather than distance, of desire rather than critique. The body in the space is already in the garden. The garden was always the body's habitat.
💻 we all live in a society 💻
🏩 phones live in a society 🏩
📲💓🥀🏩⛓🔋💖💦💌🔗✨🧊🍃💗💎💻
🌸 aesthetic pleasure 🌸
💎 emotional decadence opulence 💎
💦 overflowing from url to irl 💦
🔋 a new future imagined through integrated realities 🔋
💌 dream world coalesced with internet worlds 💌
🍃 illusion triumphs over reality 🍃
🥀 digital desire 🥀
📲 a post virtual world 📲
⛓ merging our worlds together ⛓
💖 from illusion to immersion 💖
🔗 in aesthetic pleasure 🔗
✨ feels over reals ✨
🏩 phones live in a society 🏩
📲💓🥀🏩⛓🔋💖💦💌🔗✨🧊🍃💗💎💻
🌸 aesthetic pleasure 🌸
💎 emotional decadence opulence 💎
💦 overflowing from url to irl 💦
🔋 a new future imagined through integrated realities 🔋
💌 dream world coalesced with internet worlds 💌
🍃 illusion triumphs over reality 🍃
🥀 digital desire 🥀
📲 a post virtual world 📲
⛓ merging our worlds together ⛓
💖 from illusion to immersion 💖
🔗 in aesthetic pleasure 🔗
✨ feels over reals ✨
