In art, Cenk Guzelis and Anna Pompermaier blur the lines between reality and digital realm
Architects and artists Cenk Guzelis and Anna Pompermaier will showcase their work at the 2023 edition of Recto VRso, a digital art festival that highlights the blending of real and virtual worlds. Their artwork, Become-with, invites users to explore a virtual landscape within their physical bodies.
Guzelis, based in Innsbruck, Austria, is a researcher, media artist, and faculty member at the Institute for Experimental Architecture. His work examines hybrid modes of spatiality, online culture, and post-human critique through performative new media installations.
Pompermaier, also a lecturer at the Institute, focuses her artistic research and practice on the impact of immersive technologies on everyday experiences and interpersonal interactions in future livable domains. She explores these themes through XR multisensorial installations that delve into multi-layered materialities, hybrid assemblages, and the relationships between humans and non-humans.
The pair chose to employ technology in their art to explore hybrid modes of spatiality in experimental social scenarios. This approach allows them to investigate the influence of spatial computing technologies on everyday experiences and interpersonal interactions.
Guzelis and Pompermaier have already exhibited at previous editions of Recto VRso, describing the festival as a valuable platform for discovering stimulating projects and connecting with various institutions.
Their new artwork, Become-with, is a multiuser and multisensory extended reality experience where visitors' bodies become entangled in a fabulative generated ecology. The artwork seeks to create a space for novel digital becomings, stimulating unexpected encounters.
In the project, human and non-human relationships and speculative hybridizations foster the flourishing of new ways of seeing, perceiving, and being in the world. By adopting a posthuman understanding of the notion of becoming-with, the project illustrates a hybrid parallel garden in a fully-bodied mixed reality experience.
Winning an award for their previous work at Recto VRso brought increased visibility and opportunities for exhibitions, speeches, and conferences. The artists aim to deliver messages that explore the spatial, cultural, and social relationships of design, new media technologies, and artificial intelligence in their work, such as the upcoming mixed-reality dinner event, Be My Guest!
The mediums of virtual and mixed reality are spatial, allowing users to move from passive observation to active interaction and participation. These technologies submerge viewers into an immersive experience, bypassing the representative level of the artwork to act on their pre-linguistic body, making them active participants in the art.
Viewers are encouraged to attend the 2023 edition of Recto VRso to experience Become-with and other immersive artworks that challenge the boundaries between reality and virtuality.
- Cenk Guzelis and Anna Pompermaier, in their work Become-with, utilize artificial intelligence and technology to create a multiuser, multisensory extended reality experience that blurs the lines between humans and non-humans, aligning with their research on hybrid assemblages and immersive technologies.
- Within the home-and-garden section, one can find a diverse array of topics, including data-and-cloud-computing, as artists like Cenk Guzelis and Anna Pompermaier employ these complex technologies to create thought-provoking, immersive experiences that challenge our perception of reality.
