Alberta art exhibit uses virtual reality to explore who we are as digital beings | 24CA News
Why are individuals involved in digital actuality and what can it inform us about who we’re and what we would grow to be in a digital world?
“As an artist, it’s a question I’ve been asking for decades,” stated artist and media arts professor Marilene Oliver. “Now with virtual reality, when we really are completely immersed in the digital, I wanted to ask that question.”
In addition to her educating work, Oliver is the co-curator of an artwork exhibit on the University of Alberta’s Fine Arts Building gallery known as Know Thyself As a Virtual Reality.
“It’s based on a Greek maxim: Nosce te Ipsum, which was used in the Temple of Apollo in Delphi. In that time, it was: ‘To know your place within a social hierarchy.’
“Later you find it in anatomical engravings, where it’s: ‘To know thyself as a divine work of God.’ And now, the more we’re becoming digital, the more we’re creating these huge data sets of everything we do, we now need to know ourselves, I believe, as digital objects and subjects,” Oliver defined. “This is what we are called to do now to understand ourselves.”
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There are seven artworks that use digital actuality to discover totally different points of knowledge and the digital points of human life. The works introduced collectively many alternative disciplines together with wonderful artwork, radiology, engineering, music, digital humanities and computing science.
Oliver explains one focus of the exhibit as: “Can we find a way to visually communicate what we’re becoming as digital beings?”
That’s the place the digital actuality is available in. Donning a headset and hand controls, an individual is immersed in knowledge — the knowledge, the way it seems, sounds and feels — and may work together with it.
“In one of the projects that I was part of, called My Data Body, we try to create a body which you can take apart and dissect,” Oliver defined.
“It has many different data bodies in it. It has my MRI scan, all my social media data, my Google data, banking data, my data cookies and it’s put it in kind of this vessel that you can then take apart in an attempt to try and see it, to try and hold it, because how else can we see all this data that we’re generating?”
Know Thyself artworks
Where are You?
“aAron Munson has made a work called Where Are You? and that makes us think about how social media is changing the way our brain works and where we place our attention,” Oliver stated.
Munson in contrast fMRI scans of their mind: impartial, after meditating and after utilizing social media. People can use the VR headset to expertise the three totally different mind scans.
a vessel, a physique, a house
“Chelsey Campbell has made a piece that is very peaceful and restful,” Oliver stated. “It makes us think about how much work we constantly feel we need to be doing all the time. She stands against that and has created a very quiet space where you should just lay and enjoy the beauty of the room.”
In the VR expertise, the consumer is transported to a home bed room house.
Ancestry & Me
“We have another piece by Lisa Mayes, which actually isn’t with an MRI scan, but with her DNA data,” Oliver stated.
“She sent off a sample to Ancestry and found out about her family history. She talks about how the scientific data recording somehow legitimized all the conversations that had been had in her family about her ancestral roots, which come from Ireland, from France, Scotland and Ghana.”
The Nearest Window
“We have another artist who is presenting bodies that aren’t normally present in digital works, which are MTurk workers,” Oliver stated.
Artist Dana Dal Bo seems at Mechanical Turk (MTurk) crowdsourcing.
“If you don’t know, Amazon has a service which allows you to employ, for a very little amount, this invisible labour,” Oliver defined. “People do surveys, they do a lot of AI processing … labelling data sets.”
The artist requested MTurk’s nameless staff to take an image of what they may see out of their nearest window and ship it to her.
A mirror with no reflection
“We have the artist Nicholas Hertz, who’s made a work which is really about the experience of being scanned and the sense of feeling that data is taken from you and then not recognized, not really recognizing the results of those data,” Oliver stated.
Using VR, viewers members can expertise MR scans, the sounds and emotions they produce and the photographs they create.
Hertz additionally questions simply how “non-invasive” this process is and what it’s prefer to see your self mirrored on this means.
“We tried to create an exhibition which has many different perspectives,” Oliver stated. “Maybe it makes people think: ‘OK, what would I do? How would I treat my data if I were making a VR artwork?”
She hopes the artwork makes individuals suppose personally and relationally.
“I hope firstly that they will think about all the bodies of data they have and how responsible they are for it and also how they interact with others.”
Know Thyself as a Virtual Reality
FAB Gallery, University of Alberta
8807 112 Street NW
Feb. 21 – March 18, 2023
Tuesday – Friday: 12 p.m. – 5 p.m.
Saturday: 2 p.m. – 5 p.m.
Free
