Why are folks keen on digital actuality and what can it inform us about who we’re and what we would develop into in a digital world?
“As an artist, it’s a query I’ve been asking for many years,” mentioned artist and media arts professor Marilene Oliver. “Now with digital actuality, after we actually are utterly immersed within the digital, I needed to ask that query.”
Along with her instructing work, Oliver is the co-curator of an artwork exhibit on the College of Alberta’s High-quality Arts Constructing gallery referred to as Know Thyself As a Digital Actuality.
“It’s primarily based on a Greek maxim: Nosce te Ipsum, which was used within the Temple of Apollo in Delphi. In that point, it was: ‘To know your house inside a social hierarchy.’
“Later you discover it in anatomical engravings, the place it’s: ‘To know thyself as a divine work of God.’ And now, the extra we’re turning into digital, the extra we’re creating these large knowledge units of all the pieces we do, we now have to know ourselves, I consider, as digital objects and topics,” Oliver defined. “That is what we’re referred to as to do now to grasp ourselves.”
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There are seven artworks that use digital actuality to discover completely different points of knowledge and the digital points of human life. The works introduced collectively many various disciplines together with high-quality artwork, radiology, engineering, music, digital humanities and computing science.
Oliver explains one focus of the exhibit as: “Can we discover a option to visually talk what we’re turning into 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 to be, sounds and feels — and may work together with it.
“In one of many tasks that I used to be a part of, referred to as My Information Physique, we attempt to create a physique which you’ll be able to take aside and dissect,” Oliver defined.
“It has many various knowledge our bodies in it. It has my MRI scan, all my social media knowledge, my Google knowledge, banking knowledge, my knowledge cookies and it’s put it in type of this vessel that you could then take aside in an try and try to see it, to try to maintain it, as a result of how else can we see all this knowledge that we’re producing?”
Know Thyself artworks
The place are You?
“aAron Munson has made a piece referred to as The place Are You? and that makes us take into consideration how social media is altering the best way our mind works and the place we place our consideration,” Oliver mentioned.
Munson in contrast fMRI scans of their mind: impartial, after meditating and after utilizing social media. Folks can use the VR headset to expertise the three completely different mind scans.
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a vessel, a physique, a house
“Chelsey Campbell has made a bit that could be very peaceable and restful,” Oliver mentioned. “It makes us take into consideration how a lot work we continuously really feel we should be doing on a regular basis. She stands in opposition to that and has created a really quiet house the place it’s best to simply lay and luxuriate in the fantastic thing about the room.”
Within the VR expertise, the consumer is transported to a home bed room house.
Ancestry & Me
“We’ve got one other piece by Lisa Mayes, which truly isn’t with an MRI scan, however together with her DNA knowledge,” Oliver mentioned.
“She despatched off a pattern to Ancestry and discovered about her household historical past. She talks about how the scientific knowledge recording someway legitimized all of the conversations that had been had in her household about her ancestral roots, which come from Eire, from France, Scotland and Ghana.”
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The Nearest Window
“We’ve got one other artist who’s presenting our bodies that aren’t usually current in digital works, that are MTurk staff,” Oliver mentioned.
Artist Dana Dal Bo seems to be at Mechanical Turk (MTurk) crowdsourcing.
“In case you don’t know, Amazon has a service which lets you make use of, for a little or no quantity, this invisible labour,” Oliver defined. “Folks do surveys, they do loads of AI processing … labelling knowledge units.”
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’ve got the artist Nicholas Hertz, who’s made a piece which is absolutely concerning the expertise of being scanned and the sense of feeling that knowledge is taken from you after which not acknowledged, probably not recognizing the outcomes of these knowledge,” Oliver mentioned.
Utilizing 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 wish to see your self mirrored on this manner.
“We tried to create an exhibition which has many various views,” Oliver mentioned. “Possibly it makes folks suppose: ‘OK, what would I do? How would I deal with my knowledge if I have been making a VR art work?”
She hopes the artwork makes folks suppose personally and relationally.
“I hope firstly that they’ll take into consideration all of the our bodies of knowledge they’ve and the way accountable they’re for it and likewise how they work together with others.”
Know Thyself as a Digital Actuality
FAB Gallery, College of Alberta
8807 112 Road NW
Feb. 21 – March 18, 2023
Tuesday – Friday: 12 p.m. – 5 p.m.
Saturday: 2 p.m. – 5 p.m.
Free
