Pedro Moreira - Skeuomorph

About

Pedro Moreira, also known as the digital artist persona Ped.Moreira, is a queer multi-racial artist based between Porto and London. His work explores the idea of reality through theology, identity and virtual theory. Using videogames, social media, and other virtual landscapes to create videos, installations, and performances, Pedro is interested in expressing the concept of ‘virtual-existentialism’, or the acknowledgement of one’s own ‘existence’ in a virtual and imaginary environment.

Skeuomorph (2019) is a new video installation piece that questions the progression of human (or post-human) identity as it transcends reality through virtual means. This piece presents the thought patterns of four characters with differing ethical resolves pertaining to their state of immortality within an imaginary landscape, eluding in no small part to theories of post-existence, heaven and utopianism. 

Perplexed by personal quarries such as the nature of absolute truth, righteousness, chaos, and neutrality, the four video-game avatars communicate telepathically both with the audience and each other in a perhaps futile attempt to make sense of the senseless nature of both reality and virtual reality.

Skeuomorph is the second part of Pedro Moreira’s series ‘The Tripplesapiens’, an ongoing work that focuses on the analysis of the virtual landscapes of a 3D generated videogame as a form Utopia. Inspired by the artist’s idea of ‘heaven’, instilled by their Mormon upbringing, the world of the Tripplesapiens is one in which humans have evolved, through a techno-biological process similar to that of imago (found in metamorphosing insects), into a state of immortality, where time is spent improving individual skill sets and learning more about new and past worlds.