DKB VR Art Prize

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Nominated for VR ART PRIZE 2023

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RebeccaMerlic

Rebecca Merlic (*17/01/1989 in Oberwesel am Rhein, Germany) is an European digital artist and architect, experimental filmmaker and university assistant in the core team of Experimental Game Cultures at the University of applied Arts Vienna. Her work is strongly influenced by alternative ways of society and transgression in socioeconomic conventions as well as new forms of artistic and architectural production employing new technologies. She is the holder of the Marianne von Willemer Prize 2020 for digital media.

Currently she is a transdisciplinary resident at European Alliance of Academies: Ignorance is Strength AIR program in collaboration with Akademie der Künste Berlin and HDLU Zagreb and she is working on DigitalHumanism x FutureLiving in collaboration with the Austrian Cultural Forum in Tokyo.

Her artworks were on display at ARS ELECTRONICA in Linz, Athens Digital Arts Festival, the Austrian Cultural Forum in Tokyo as well as the Belvedere21 in Vienna. She was part of the ARS ELECTRONICA jury committee in the category Computer Animation with Isabelle Arvers, Daito Manabe, Helen Starr and Peter Burr.

 

© Portrait Rebecca Merlic by Anna Manabe

GLITCHBODIES, 2022-ongoing

GLITCHBODIES, is an interactive VR computer game that explores new forms of feminism, LGBTQ+, Drag transformations and intimate sensitive representations of the protagonists and aims to bring them to a wider audience. In GLITCHBODIES, Avatar becomes a collective and politically charged body. Video games have undoubtedly become the most widespread form of entertainment and its impact on representational stereotypes is huge. With ‘‘GLITCHBODIES’’ Rebecca Merlic responds to socio-political factors as well as to the very male-dominated world of video games by creating an interactive digital space, a fluid journey through infinite individual, gender, and realities.

 

GLITCHBODIES provide a safe platform for non-heteronormative gender positions sharing the notion of queer as political attitude, providing new perspective for the player while celebrating its protagonists with motherly care. Created through collaborations and rituals, ‘‘GLITCHBODIES’’ protagonists are not singular points of views, but they live in connection with each other, they understand themselves as a series of experiences and these successions of relationships constitute their networked identity and collective body, a network made of multitude (bodies, identities) and therefore is free from conventions and constraints (of binary, of hierarchy, of gender) and hence becomes political. And as our boundaries dispersed throughout cyberspace, the very understanding of what is a ‘‘body’’ is in question.