On January 30, Barbara London will moderate an expansive conversation on how artists have appropriated the medium of virtual reality to create immersive artworks. The panel discussion, Real 2.0: Artists Discuss Immersive Art in the Virtual Landscape, takes place at the Pratt Manhattan Campus in conjunction with the gallery’s current exhibition, Hsin-Chien Huang: The Data We Called Home.
Panelists Mattia Casalegno, Hsin-Chien Huang (via Zoom), and Rachel Rossin will interrogate the medium of VR, addressing questions such as: Can art be virtual? Does the virtual contradict the real? And what is the future of the medium?
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The Data We Called Home, curated by Pratt Professor Linda Lauro-Lazin, is Hsin-Chien Huang’s first solo virtual reality exhibit in the US. Through video, sculpture, and VR, Huang remaps Taiwanese folklore, the ethics of digital surveillance, space exploration, and the body-mind dichotomy. The exhibition also features two collaborative VR works made with artist and musician Laurie Anderson.
The exhibition centers around four virtual reality journeys — “Samsara” (2021), “Bodyless” (2019), “To the Moon” (2018), and “Chalkroom” (2017) — alongside stainless steel and 3D-printed sculptures. The multimedia installations invite viewers to immerse themselves in the otherworldly spaces, stories, and forms reimagined by Huang. In these virtual realities, bodies are porous, chronologies are nonlinear, and environments resemble dystopian dreamscapes.
The panel Real 2.0 takes place on January 30, 6:30pm (ET), in Room 201 at Pratt Institute on 144 West 14th Street. The discussion is free and open to the public; advance registration is required through Eventbrite.
The Data We Called Home is on view through March 4, at Pratt Manhattan Gallery’s newly renovated ground floor space open Monday through Saturday, 11am–6pm. Admission is free; advance registration is not required.
Learn more about the exhibition at pratt.edu and register for the panel discussion on January 30.
Source: Hyperallergic.com