Game Art: Desirée Holman: Heterotopias/ MATRIX 238 (June 26, 2011 - September 18, 2011, Berkeley Art Museum, Oakland, California)

"Heterotopias begins with a screen, frames within a frame so to speak, as the video projection frames an image of several individuals typing away on their laptops. Their specific activities are left unseen, the screens serving as frames for everyday realities, empty ciphers for the ubiquity of our experience with them—the mundanity of work, communication, news, and information. Holman is interested in how this constant technological presence forms and mediates our sense of self and our social relations, but also how it serves as a portal to other more fantastical forms of attachment and desire in virtual space. There is total fluidity in the construction of fantasy-based cultures in virtual reality, gaming, and popular media, and Holman’s interest in fantasy and play is as complex and fluid, moving among physical, mental, and virtual realms of make-believe.

The video combines live action with digital animation, the space of reality and virtual reality collapsed and complicated along its progression. Each individual in Heterotopias imagines a character for himself or herself, realized in the flesh through Holman’s handmade props and costumes and digitally through the creation of fully rendered 3-D models. The role-playing transcends the real and the virtual, as we slip between the characters’ physical embodiments of their avatars through live action (along the range of aggressive to ecstatic) and the digital models of those same characters, inhabiting environments that refer to the origins of their characters. At times the 3-D digital models appear a bit like the virtual puppets they actually are, the visible wireframe revealing the sculptural underpinning of their making along with the apparatus of their possible movement. " (Elizabeth Thomas)

Desirée Holman (b. 1974) is an interdisciplinary artist who lives and works in Oakland, California; she received her MFA from Univesity of California at Berkeley. Her research-intensive projects begin with figurative props that are produced by the artist and manipulated in performance or role-playing scenarios. The resulting multimedia installations encompass sculpture, performance, video, digital processing, and drawing.

Link: Desirée Holman

Link: BAM/PFA

Submitted by Matteo Bittanti