Emergence Gallery: Art Shadows/Resilience
Emergence - Art Shadows- Resilience
The metaverse, with its vast interactive digital space, is a rich landscape for collective expression and embodied learning. A cosmos made of paintings in the metaverse can offer a universal perspective to express opinions freely, collectively, and purposefully - to demand a better world. Ideally in the metaverse, you can enter a new kind of art world that challenges current and historical cultural norms. Where mixed reality will become a familiar, safe, and trustworthy place for individual artists to support collective purpose. An open and safe society is the basis of democracy. Reimagining virtual space is one way to reframe important conversations while improving people’s inner feelings of security and well being. Experimenting to envision the future, like sharing music or painting, in cyberspace, is a kind of rehearsal for life after COVID-for when we are even deeper into this limbo state of safe/not safe. Art is resilience. It is a counter to loneliness and despair. A new collectively created composition or self portrait arises over time out of the behavior of the avatar’s bodies. Novel social chemistry is possible. If you produce something out of the collective on the basis that it is different from what any individual or group would have produced on their own, then this is an emergent phenomenon.
My collaborators and I have created a screen-based game-like virtual experience called “Emergence /Art Shadows- Resilience“ made of paintings. This world offers an alternative perspective on the behavior of the audience. You are both an observer and an actor - when you walk into paintings and jump off them.When you enter this exhibit, you shift perspective into the body of an “other”. Whether flying, jumping, or climbing into a painting, you're experiencing the perspective of the paint, learning what the paint layers feel like on their home terrain. In this virtual world the importance of strange dimensions, texture,and the play of surface sensibility matter. The value of the physical, of its materiality, cannot be overstated. For example you can explore paint space. Black voids exist among the palette of immersive colors. The drama comes from wanting to know/ be a painting and to transform using painting. I am interested in portraying painting space physically, imaginally, and psychologically.
You encounter paintings contextualized to build a dream-like journey toward a way out of this state of rupture and chaos we are all living in. Many of the pieces reflect the absorption and conflict that current and historical cultural “readymades” or memes, tropes, and topical sensibilities can have. There is a tide or ebb and flow of our collective cyber intelligence constantly changing and influencing our subconscious.These pieces (art shadows) of conscious and unconscious form composites or groups in a particular way like in Non-Linear Identity (NLI) --the first gallery in our space. NLI is a plea for a world view encompassing endless possible identities. It recognizes that our psyche houses a multiplicity of selves. Hints of nightmares, renewal, and compassion can co-exist. My ideal for this world is to inspire embodiment of your felt, but often unrecognized, art shadows, the unanticipated paradigms of forming non linear identities, so you can create or design a true and free imaginal self.
Why Emergence
This project was inspired by Emergent phenomena.
For Emergence to be relevant to an art experience, two things are needed: 1. Lots of individual experiences (in this case art pieces - there are over a hundred paintings, sculptures, photos and drawings - that actually enter our multi-dimensional virtual world. 2. Unanticipated art configurations and assemblages arising out of the relationships - specifically new phenomena arising from the actions of lots of individual “particles.” In this case the avatars take actions on behalf of their human counterparts. The behavior of the aggravate is different from the behavior of a few individuals. With their actions each visitor self-authors the equivalent of a unique and singular pattern. Imagine a square in a giant quilt. A new collectively created composition arises over time out of the behavior of the avatar’s bodies. If you produce something out of the collective on the basis that it is different from what any individual or big group would have produced on their own, this is an emergent phenomenon.
