Are we all here? Exploring Embodied Virtuality Today

About

Are we all here?
Exploring Embodied Virtuality Today
Group exhibition (on-site and online)

with contributions by Olga Bushkova, Corpos Informáticos, Maëlle Gross, Lauren Huret, Eduardo Kac, Marc Lee, Tammara Leites/Simon Senn, Katrin Niedermeier, Alexandra Pfammatter, Be Van Vark

Opening hours: Friday & Saturday: 6–8pm
and by appointment: info@oncurating-space.org

Ancillary program:
12 Nov, 6pm (Zoom): Talk by Stefan Kaegi
13 Nov, 2pm (Zoom): Talk by Eduardo Kac
20 Nov, 2pm (Zoom): Performance by ACOCORÉ / Corpos Informaticos
27 Nov, 2pm (Zoom): Performance-Workshop by Tammara Leites/Simon Senn

Are we all here? Exploring Embodied Virtuality Today explores discourses around connectivity and intimacy through the use of digital tools, from the beginnings of the internet in the early 1990s to its development in the following decades. With the onset of the current circumstances set by the COVID-19 pandemic, societies are –more than ever – confronted with (self-)isolation, loss of physical contact and an increasing shift of social interactions into digital space. Conceived in this situation, the project has taken early net artworks from the 1990s and 2000s as an opportunity to explore our today's changed behaviour of closeness, intimacy and other relations through digital means.

Central in the exhibition space is Eduardo Kac’s work Teleporting An Unknown State (1994/96), an early interactive biotelematic which will be reconceptualized for this exhibition. The installation combines a telematic presence (live-streamed webcams) with the planetary in the form of a plant that receives light only by means of the screen.  Affiliated to this work, the net art work Telepresence2 (2001) on display on-site documents Corpos Informáticos performative encounter within a technological setup that uncannily resembles our current gatherings over Zoom and similiar digital tools. The series of performances of Telepresence explored digital encounters with hundreds of images and sounds of remote participants across their network.

Influenced by these considerations of proximity, intimacy and isolation with digital means, works by Marc Lee, Maëlle Gross, Alexandra Pfammatter, Katrin Niedermeier, Lauren Huret, and Olga Bushkova are either shown digitally or on-site. A self-observational documentary video work of intimate choreographies conducted in a series of zoom workshops by choreographer Be Van Vark, joins the artists works.
In addition, lectures, and lecture-performances, held by Eduardo Kac, Corpos Informáticos, Stefan Kaegi, Boris Magrini and Tammara Leites/Simon Senn will accompany the exhibition.

The three-part exhibition will be realized in the OnCurating exhibition space, on the digital platform http://www.areweallhere.net/ and with an accompanying program. The digital platform is not only a documentation of the exhibition on site, but extends the physical exhibition into the digital. The digital platform will go live together with the exhibition opening, and the works shown digitally will also no longer be on view when the exhibition ends. The talks will be added to the digital platform as they occur.

Press material can be found closer to the opening here:
https://oncurating-space.org/are-we-all-here-exploring-embodied-virtuality-today/

We would like to thank ProHelvetia for their support.