Saturday 13 August 2016

Jillian Mayer & Lucas Leyva - Swing space

Artists Jillian Mayer and Lucas Leyva make work that explores our relationships with and within digital technologies. There work ranges from web projects, music videos, and expanded cinema.

Swing space 2013 

'A meeting of the virtual and the physical world, Swing Space creates a blissful immersive experience that approaches the sublime.

The skies in Swing Space are digitally enhanced to contribute to the sense of a mediated reality that is authentically enjoyable on various sensory levels. Visitors were welcome to swing in the installation during gallery hours.'
Jillian Mayer -
 http://www.jillianmayer.net/index.php?/ongoing/cloud-swing/


Swing space - 2013

















I am uncertain this work 'creates a blissful immersive experience that approaches the sublime' more than using a swing in the regular context of a park might. 

For me this is a work enthused with melancholy and failure, the failure of technology to replicate those classical 'sublime' experiences of being connected with or within nature. Here the failure is made explicit. it is not a whole view we see but a stuttering fragmented one. while there is a playful otherness in the use of swings and projected clouds in an interior space there also seems a kind of dystopian melencoly that soon this is all the nature you will get. As technology develops the line between the actual and virtual become evermore blurred. The work seems to raise questions about  a future in which nature is augmented; could we relax and recuperate in a virtual landscape as we do in an actual one? Would we even notice? Would we care? Is there even a difference?

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