Organized by

MFA Design

lasher@cca.edu

Entry details

This exhibition explores the boundaries (or lack thereof) of digital space, and the loss of physical presence precipitated by the pandemic. This exhibition asks: how might we transcend mere facsimiles of the physical world? How might the auratic presence of a physical or experiential work be augmented in the digital realm? How might networked, asynchronous, or hypermediated communication be (or fail to be) a surrogate for in-person interaction? What new worlds or dimensions open up when we’re always alone, yet also always together on the internet? What new methods of collaboration, discourse, and embodiment might arise in this context?

This year’s graduating thesis cohort laments the loss of physical presence (of one another, of urban space, of physical models, of body language, of coincidence and chance encounters), and tips our collective hat towards the new interaction models brought to birth by this crisis. There’s a mis-registration here: an uneasy layering of both deep sadness and emergent curiosity about the state of the world, and about the future of our collective practice. The loss of physical presence has flattened all forms, and yet these flattened forms have potential to exist in the infinite expanse of the digital realm. Is a website flat or deep? Are we all net artists now? Infinite Flatness is a mis-registration, a synaesthetic gesture, a recursive loop. In this context, our work gains a new form of relativity