"Like many people, I spend a lot of time existing within virtual spaces, such as video games and social networks. The virtual world invades and sometimes overrides my physical world and relationships. My artwork has become a cathartic means of exorcising my own addictive tendencies to technology. This addiction is ironic given that the virtual, and the technology that enables it, has been thought of as a freeing element within our society.Donna Haraway wrote in the “Cyborg Manifesto” of a being called a Cyborg, which exists within the virtual realm that transcends race, gender and even historical ties - we are this being. Yet we have failed to achieve Haraway’s vision, instead of transcending our physical selves. Instead we, as a society, have created hyper-real, clichéd versions of ourselves. Our society has become obsessed with virtual space, not as a free space of ideas and harmony, but rather as a contained space for discord and fantasy. In digital installations and video work I explore this failure and the obsessions that lead to it. My goal is to be able to isolate the unseen forces that make virtual space such a compatible mechanism for desire and escape within our society.
To develop my understanding of virtual space I am exploring the aesthetics of immersion and interface. The primary method of this exploration in my work consists of video, because it replicates the experience of the virtual interface, and installation, is able to create an experience within the gallery that is psychologically similar to that of immersing oneself within a virtual space. My recent work focuses on the use of virtual space as a tool to create ‘shadow personalities’. Using the idea of the shadow, as defined by Jungian psychology, we can understand avatars and other virtual identities as not only idealized virtual representations, but also as conduits for realizing our own unconscious selves which we may or may not wish to acknowledge. By understanding 'shadow personalities' I hope to explore some of the more damaging effects virtual space can have on the human psyche." (Peter Pazderski)
link: Peter Pazderski
Submitted by Matteo Bittanti
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