Longing
With the increasing number of digital media in our daily life, on the one hand, we have more tools to memorialize the events happened day to day and preserve the history in the past. On the other hand, these external tools inherently become part of the representation of the past. In the discussion about fetish, Sigmund Freud mentions that “the part of body is substituted for the whole, or an object is substituted for the past.” In order to achieve wholeness, the longing for the substitution never ceased. Documenting and reconfiguring the past is the nature to us that we need them to fulfill the incompleteness for the desire of wholeness. These external objects in the digital epoch are not just physical existence, but also virtual content. Longing features two virtual reality experiences created by artists Pierre Friquet and Miao Tian & Yang Liu, and the 3D printing installation made by artist Luke Ikard. These artworks that utilize cutting-edge technologies pursuit for connection with a nebulous end.
Artist: Pierre Friquet, Luke Ikard, Miao Tian & Yang Liu
Curator: Haoran Chang
Address: 325 Canal Street, New York, NY
Time: August 9th to August 23rd, 2019
Opening Reception: August 8th, 2019, 6pm-10pm
Closing Reception: August 23rd, 2019, 6pm-10pm
Live Performance
August 23rd, featuring in closing reception
Artist: Yihan Chen, Lan Shi Otayonii
Supported by ON CANAL / the district for new ideas / operated by Wallplay & co-curated by Vibes
Patterns
Pierre Friquet
Co-creator: Ando Shah
Credits: Federico Saldarini, Mourad Bennadcer, Jean-Yves Münch
Virtual Reality
Patterns is a supernatural horror psychedelic experience narrating the reemergence of a repressed past. Walter plunges into a hypnosis session to investigate why he feels dispossessed from his own body. Through memories, imagination and a recurrent nightmare he travels on a mental journey to decipher bizarre signs his own past. What Walter encounters is a family secret in the form of a monster that goes on a rampage in the sewage of his ancestral house. Once the viewer puts on the headset, they are within the mind of the protagonist, exploring his suppressed memories, contained within rooms of a Victorian house. Within room-scale VR, they are able to walk from memory to memory, bearing witness to the unfolding of events. In many ways it can be compared to interactive theater, but the viewer has a much more personal journey as the mind of the protagonist reacts to their presence.
Urbangazer
Miao Tian & Yang Liu
Virtual Reality
Urbangazer lets people see an otherwise absent starry sky above Manhattan in Virtual Reality. By laying down, a real time virtual starry sky appears on top of manmade dazzles of New York City. While the artists are searching for ways to reconnect to their childhood stargazing experiences, the question remains: in this post digital age, why are we constantly finding ourselves yearning to reconnect to the experiences we lost pre-technologies?
NightStand
Luke Ikard
3D Printed Nightstands of Various Sizes, LCD Screens, Animation Loops
Using video footage taken while walking through his childhood home that had been sold and emptied to prepare for the new homeowners, Luke Ikard digitally reconstructs memories with objects that serve as portals to a lost childhood. Honoring a love of craft instilled in him by the generations of carpenters in his family, Ikard creates 3D printed interpretations of the objects that furnished his former home. Using these renderings of tables, couches, beds, and nightstands, Ikard explores the distortion and authenticity of his memory recall. Inspired by Susan Stewart’s writings (On Longing) detailing the mental and emotional experiences that relate to the human body through the miniature, the collection, and the souvenir, Ikard uses fragmentary home-like installations to give memories form through furniture, evoking a disquieting sense of anxiety and loss. In these works, everyday objects are narrated to animate or realize certain versions of a past home.