The COFA Annual 2013

“A historical moment: the hologram is now part of this “subliminal comfort” that is our destiny, of this happiness now consecrated to the mental simulacrum and to the environmental fable of special effects” (Baudrillard 1994, p. 107). This project reflects upon the phenomena of distributed emotional engagement with real (that is, physical) and virtual spaces. It proposes that between these physical and virtual spaces is a region referred to as heterotopias, an area that has been infinitely opened by computer users who have turned physical space into a new sensory space (data space). The term, ‘Heterotopia’ was coined by Michel Foucault in Of Other Spaces (1986) to describe one place in time that allows a person to experience different ‘belongings’. Heterotopias are ‘places’ our thoughts and dreams reside while waiting to connect to our own reality. In the computer era, Lev Manovich in The Poetics of Augmented Space (2007) has referred to this concept of space as ‘augmented space’, to describe these new ‘environments’ and their affect on the relationship between people and ‘place’. Antony Bryant and Griselda Pollock in the Digital & Other Virtualities (2010), argue that virtuality has yet been unrealised, is not merely a new dimension of our worlds shaped by new media technologies. In the register of philosophical thinking, virtuality means which has the potential to become actual, but is yet unrealised. In other words, Virtuality is “a potential actuality”; it is “an expandable reality that indicates the constant movement of becoming, of transformative potentiality in the world”. (Bryant and Pollock 2010, p.15) In the context of human need, this experience of virtuality remained the rule until the creation of virtual computer environments. Such experiences are likely to be multiple fragmented ways to express physical space overlaid by changing dreams, thoughts and information from multimedia. It is a concept that acknowledges how humans are deeply affected by the environment, as well as their dependency upon virtual space. In light of this, my practice investigates new types of a highly subjective form of psychological association that can now be made between physical and virtual space. In my work, the scratch hologram represents ‘the virtual’ and to change mark making from traditional printmaking and etching effects to show a transition from the real to the virtual these marks transform from depicting boundaries of roof structures to become floating virtual holographic spaces. The content of the imagery is a reconstruction of roof images from buildings found in Korea, conceived of as new sensory spaces. These kinds of new sensory space are demonstrated, by reinstating the formal spatial representational painting styles of Eastern historic paintings. This oblique projection style enables the representation of space without a vanishing point, therefore, providing multiple points of view. Correspondingly, my work reflects a range of spaces between the physical and virtual through a transition from line drawing to scratch hologram.

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