REAL VIRTUALITY
Exhibition text by Yuri Zupancic • Aspen Collective Gallery •
Aspen, Colorado • July 2024
Everything ‘virtual’ was so abstract and distant. Until it wasn’t. Online banking, shopping, working, dating – even catching up with friends and family – has become so integral to most of our lives that its exoticism has evolved into normality. This shift happened so quickly and (mostly) seamlessly that I’m left grasping pixels and trying to weigh the tangible, palpable presence of the myriad fruits of the internet explosion. It’s a cornucopia of knowledge and distraction, of convenience and confusion, of utopia and turmoil. And it’s only growing. That’s our reality.
What if we subject our machines to human algorithms? Can we evolve in harmony with artificial intelligence? Far from a luddite, I embrace technological evolution as natural evolution. But we can’t go to sleep at the wheel. My art practice is an effort to speak to machines on human terms, on an intuitive level, painting life onto microchips, projecting animations on paintings, inviting humor and wonder down holistic tangents to complement all the binary logic.
As a multi-media artist, I’m endlessly inspired by the incredible tools expanding our capacity for creative expression, giving new voice to imagination. It would be foolish to resist trying new technology. I don’t want to simply meet machines in the middle, I hope we boost each other to higher ground, co-evolving gracefully and doing some good for the world. But Marshall McLuhan convincingly defined communication technology as an extension of man… so I’m probably just talking to myself, and hoping to gain some kind of insight.
We’re living in uncharted territory, beyond the limits of any classical understanding, which is why I rely on art to open my mind a little wider and glimpse some new perspectives.
Afternet
Exhibition text by Yuri Zupancic • Cider Gallery • Lawrence, Kansas, July, 2019
Update installed. You are now ready for use. The world wide web is so now thoroughly integrated into everyday life that we hardly even notice it anymore. Like gravity or the cycles of the moon, it affects everything but is rarely questioned or acknowledged. Now we only mention it when disappears, leaving us desperately stranded without Google Maps, social media notifications, or streaming videos.
The art in this exhibition shines a surreal, critical and sometimes humorous light on life in the postinternet era, where we speak to our loved ones in GIFs, talk out loud to our ‘smart’ houses and cars, and fake news is weapon of war. Suddenly this all seems normal somehow... Sometimes it’s important to take a step back and reflect on the the weirdness that discreetly double-clicked its way into our hearts, minds, bodies, and societies.
Artist Talk for Screen Deep solo exhibition at Lawrence Arts Center, December 2016