VIRTUALITIES AND REALITIES
RIXC Art Science Festival
Riga, October 19 – 21, 2017
Festival webpage >> http://festival2017.rixc.org
Vytautas MICHELKEVIČIUS, Lina MICHELKEVIČE. Other Virtuality: Tracing the Real in Maps and Diagrams within Artistic Research
This performative and visual presentation deals with the notion of “map” and “diagram” within artistic research and aims to outline how artists and curators made diagrammatic representations offer a different insight into reality.
The map in its original sense is a primary form of virtuality. Being a conventional representation of a real landscape it simulates the reality and requires an imaginative input, yet at the same affects the real movement of bodies of those using the map. Nowadays geographic maps offer more and more immersive environments – take e. g. Google Street View – that allow to travel in allegedly real landscapes without actually moving. However one can claim that with increased technologisation, accuracy, and immersiveness, the imaginary element is being lost: as the virtual becomes too close to the real, our perception of reality becomes more and more uniform.
Focusing on several case studies, selected from Inter-format Symposium Along Lines (Nida Art Colony, 2017) and Vytautas Michelkevičius book Converged by Artistic Research in Lithuania and Beyond (Vilnius Academy of Arts Press 2016/2017), the presentation will discuss different ways of representing reality in diagrammatic forms, proposed by artists and those working in artistic research. Works by artists, such as Christoph Fink or Nicolaus Gansterer, offer subjective ways of tracing reality. Unlike the standardised maps and diagrams (geographic or other), such artistic maps can proliferate with new diagrammatic responses (see e.g. Gansterer’s collaborative projects with scientists, choreographers, etc.).