Exploring the world of Virtual Reality through the eyes of an artist.
"It’s the promise of immortality while still being so frail, so errant, and so dumb, you know? And that’s what drives certain artists to use the medium that they use.”
Rachel Rossin is a painter and new media artist both who approaches virtual reality as a medium, a lens. I don’t know Rossin personally. But I recognize her work as kin;
Colorful. Organic.
Fluid. Poetic.
Romantic. Sensitive.
My heart beats for this silky combination of technology, wonder and consciousness.
It turns out she learned programming and painting at the same time. And I’m glad she let the two merge into each other, if it ever were a choice.
Materially, technology meets us cold and hard, composed of glass, plastic. If you throw it, it cracks. If you drop it, the screen fractures. Internally assembled by blocks of code, lines of instruction…is it our human nature that wants to coax it open into something more flexible, to pour in bubbles and blobs? Is it because our own bodies are composed of up to 60% water (on a good day)?
In an interview with foldmagazine, Rossin states,
“In VR, you feel like the memory of a body, the emotional memory of a body.
I missed my body.”
Working in between the worlds of digital and physical, I think most of us can relate. A attraction and repulsion to technology.
A love, a hate, a reconciliation.
