DKB VR Art Prize

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Nominated for VR ART PRIZE 2023

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LaurenMoffatt

Lauren Moffatt is an Australian artist working with immersive environments and experimental narrative practices. Her works, often presented in hybrid and iterative forms, explore the paradoxical subjectivity of connected bodies and the indistinct boundaries between digital and organic life. Her works take the form of speculative fictions and environments, which are conceived using a mixture of traditional, obsolete and pioneering technologies, and which often occupy both physical and virtual space. Lauren builds detailed, complex and paradoxical universes, occupied by misfits and recluses and populated by strange devices and artefacts.

In 2022 Lauren was awarded the Certamen Internacional dee Arte Digital (ES) and the Revista MAKMA Prize (ES), in 2021 she was awarded the grand prize in the inaugural DKB VR Art Prize (DE). Lauren completed her studies in painting, in theory and practice of new media art and in audiovisual creation at the College of Fine Arts (AU), Université Paris VIII (FR), and at Le Fresnoy Studio National des Arts Contemporains (FR) respectively.

Lauren's works have been exhibited internationally at Zabludowicz Collection (UK), Octobre Numerique (FR), La Gaïté Lyrique (FR), SXSW (US), Haus am Lützowplatz (DE), UNSW Galleries (AU), Daegu Art Museum (KOR), Le Grand Palais Ephémère (FR), SAVVY Contemporary (DE), FACT Liverpool (UK) The Sundance Film Festival (US) ZKM (DE), Q21 Freiraum (AT) and at Hartware MedienkunstVerein (DE). She lives and works in Berlin and Valencia.

 

© Portrait Lauren Moffatt by David Zarzoso

 

Local Binaries, In Production

Every person you meet holds a world inside them, what does yours look like? This was the question artist Lauren Moffatt asked nine women from across the world in order to define the blueprints for the collectively written universe inside Local Binaries. This is a virtual space that can be explored by the viewer in miniature scale via augmented reality (this version already exists in a first iteration) or as an immersive experience in the virtual reality version (the virtual reality adaptation is in progress).

 

Drawing inspiration from therapy techniques that encourage embodied mindfulness – like body mapping – participants were asked to focus on their inner state and interpret it as a landscape. They imagined geological forms, sounds, plant-life, weather systems and architectures to delineate the physiological and psychological sensations they felt.

 

They then relayed the scene to the artist as if describing physical surroundings. The artist recreated elements from each testimonial, collaborating with artificial intelligence to visualise each described detail, hand-painting and 3D modelling the images produced by the AI and then using a game engine to interweave and collage them into a sprawling virtual universe that audiences can interact with.

 

Virtual reality artists are optimally positioned to pioneer the metaverse beyond the data-driven empires of tech giants, who threaten to nullify our identities and dictate our shared human future. Local Binaries uses digital technologies to create a collective introspective place, deliberately decelerating and decentralising as a form of resistance. It connects the viewers to the protagonists of the work and to each other in an intimate time-based experience that asks them to be in the present with each other. It creates a collectivity that infiltrates geographic boundaries as well as borders between the digital and the real, and between bodies and minds.