Venice biennale vernissage5/29/2023 ![]() These visits are fueled by the desire to see as much as one can in a short period of time and Campari, which for me is a sure picker-upper on 20,000-step days. I’ve been lucky to return to Venice since, sometimes for the Vernissage of the Biennale, others during the calmer ensuing days. It was a magical trifecta of art immersion. However, I think Aitken's work is good enough to remind us that the digital is not just a referential pointer to the physical but a place of primary experience, worthy of being collected-worthy of being considered complete.As I was getting ready to depart for the Vernissage of the 2022 Venice Biennale, it was daunting to realize that I’ve been to the Biennale 12 times my first was in 1997 when in addition to the Biennale, Documenta X and the Munster Sculpture Project were also on view. Vortic, like its competitor Eazel, seems resistant to considering the digital asset as the collectible artwork in itself, while platforms like Artland and Artsy are embracing them. For a technology that has been floating around the art world for a decade, its use can still feel naively novel. But even when viewed by artists and galleries as a medium, VR-based works are often large production projects where the relational aesthetics of hardware devices and technology overpower the formal qualities in control of the artist. Yet this utilty is mostly without imagination, unevolved in the last ten years. One can make an articulate value proposition for it including convenience, a low carbon footprint, accessibility and the practicality of only having to make an artwork once it has sold. But this is not the case for an artwork created in VR it is practical. Using sound, reflective surfaces and VR, Doug Aitken’s exhibition Open uses algorithms to present new site-specific sculptures that are entirely responsive to the virtual environments they are rooted in Vortic installation view, Doug Aitken, Courtesy the artist 303 Gallery, New York Galerie Eva Presenhuber, Zurich Victoria Miro, London and Regen Projects, Los Angeles © The artistĪrt’s utility has always been slippery and ineffable. Yet, the size and material listing make it feel like a prototype whose ultimate actualisation is physical, should it first find a buyer. It’s wonderful to see VR used as a two-way road, moving "phigitally" (that's physically and digitally) to and from the digital across material reality. ![]() This work is “not yet realised.” The artist and engineers at Vortic had to thus consider digital and physical constraints in designing and executing this work. It is listed as being 415.3cm tall and made from mirrored stainless steel and granite stone. It required Vortic to develop technology that could reflect the moving sky in the rotating sculpture. The show's central work is Metallic Sleep (2022). The works are site-specific within digitally invented sites that are obsessively rendered. Post(ish?) pandemic, Vortic’s technical excellence challenges our lack of imagination in regards to VR as a medium.Īitken’s Venice exhibition contains interactive sculptures installed in, and reflecting, an imaginary architectural environment. The pandemic threw the art world headfirst (and mostly headset-less) into using VR as a way to digitise physical experiences and present them for sale. In direct comparison to Venice's inconvenience is Doug Aitken’s exhibition Open, presented by the London-based virtual reality (VR) platform Vortic in the convenient format of VR. It was, by all accounts, a year to be there and fully surrender to the inherent inconvenience of a city inhospitable to stilettos. So does Stravinsky and Ezra Pound, both of whom rest in my favourite place in Venice-the island of San Michele.įeeling modern and very much alive last month, the art world-liberated from Covid restrictions, and aware that such freedom could be tenuous-arrived in Venice en masse and partied like it was 1999. Thomas Mann, that great explorer of what it means to be modern, has much to do with this. Personally, I associate Venice with death and inconvenience.
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