revirtualizing
drowning in reality
A fountain flows at the centre of a hyper-femme, hyper-connected world: revirtualizing immerses the body in the desiring-currents of queer online counter-publics, flooding physical space with the utopian intensities of a future already underway.
collaboration with Lea Neckel
exhibited at:
Vienna (AT): Parallel 2022
supported by Kulturland Burgenland
exhibited at:
Vienna (AT): Parallel 2022
supported by Kulturland Burgenland
RE-V is a multi-sensory installation that materialises the desiring-currents flowing through hyper-femme online spaces, channelling their opulence, warmth and utopian charge into a charged physical encounter. A fountain occupies the centre of the space as a sculptural and symbolic wellspring: its perpetual circulation of water figures the internet as an endless stream of longing, a flow that carries within it the accumulated desire for community, liberation, and futures otherwise foreclosed. Iridescent inflatables gather around it like presences, soft sculptures whose synthetic femininity pulses under luminous pink and purple light, diffracting across the room in iridescent refractions. The air carries the scent of sweet fruit. The floor glows. Visitors enter a space that holds them.
The installation operates through what Deleuze and Guattari would recognise as desiring-production: the work does not represent desire but produces it, assembles it, lets it leak across the threshold between the digital and the physical until that threshold dissolves into something more like a membrane, permeable and alive. The formal vocabulary of the work draws directly from the aesthetic intensities of internet subcultures shaped by fem-queer communities, communities for whom the online has historically functioned as a counter-public in the Fraserian sense: a space of subaltern world-building where marginalised subjects rehearse, perform and sustain visions of existence that dominant culture refuses to reflect back at them. Revirtualizing re-downloads this counter-public into physical space, making it inhabitable, making it shared.
Where Mark Fisher diagnosed capitalist realism as the foreclosure of futurity, this installation insists on the proliferative potential of the virtual, understood in its Deleuzian register as the reservoir of difference that has yet to actualise. The fountain's eternal recirculation is precisely this: a figure of the unexhausted, a spring that does not run dry. The installation does not archive or memorialise the queer internet; it lets it overflow. It floods the gallery with the affective intensities that fem-queer online communities have always known how to generate and sustain, intensities that accelerate toward connection, toward collectivity, toward the speculative futures that desire itself opens up when it is allowed to flow.
The dialogue around digital futures has been shaped predominantly by masculinist techno-utopian imaginaries. Revirtualizing constitutes an intervention into that discourse from a fem-queer position, one that insists on the political productivity of softness, of iridescence, of the synthetic and the sentimental. The work draws on the lineage of cyberfeminism and Haraway's cyborg manifesto while extending into the present conditions of platform culture, affirming the possibility that these spaces, so often read as escapism or spectacle, carry real desiring-force, real world-building capacity. The physical installation becomes a site of collective gathering, a space where offline coming-together is made possible by the energies that online communities have accumulated and preserved.
Revirtualizing -- drowning in reality proposes immersion as method and as politics: to be held by the flowing present of this space is to already be inside a different future, one that is always springing forward.
The installation operates through what Deleuze and Guattari would recognise as desiring-production: the work does not represent desire but produces it, assembles it, lets it leak across the threshold between the digital and the physical until that threshold dissolves into something more like a membrane, permeable and alive. The formal vocabulary of the work draws directly from the aesthetic intensities of internet subcultures shaped by fem-queer communities, communities for whom the online has historically functioned as a counter-public in the Fraserian sense: a space of subaltern world-building where marginalised subjects rehearse, perform and sustain visions of existence that dominant culture refuses to reflect back at them. Revirtualizing re-downloads this counter-public into physical space, making it inhabitable, making it shared.
Where Mark Fisher diagnosed capitalist realism as the foreclosure of futurity, this installation insists on the proliferative potential of the virtual, understood in its Deleuzian register as the reservoir of difference that has yet to actualise. The fountain's eternal recirculation is precisely this: a figure of the unexhausted, a spring that does not run dry. The installation does not archive or memorialise the queer internet; it lets it overflow. It floods the gallery with the affective intensities that fem-queer online communities have always known how to generate and sustain, intensities that accelerate toward connection, toward collectivity, toward the speculative futures that desire itself opens up when it is allowed to flow.
The dialogue around digital futures has been shaped predominantly by masculinist techno-utopian imaginaries. Revirtualizing constitutes an intervention into that discourse from a fem-queer position, one that insists on the political productivity of softness, of iridescence, of the synthetic and the sentimental. The work draws on the lineage of cyberfeminism and Haraway's cyborg manifesto while extending into the present conditions of platform culture, affirming the possibility that these spaces, so often read as escapism or spectacle, carry real desiring-force, real world-building capacity. The physical installation becomes a site of collective gathering, a space where offline coming-together is made possible by the energies that online communities have accumulated and preserved.
Revirtualizing -- drowning in reality proposes immersion as method and as politics: to be held by the flowing present of this space is to already be inside a different future, one that is always springing forward.
