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My work examines the intersection of
psychoanalysis, media theory, and alienation arising out of a contemporary milieu that
blurs the demarcations between physical and virtual, child and adult, process and
outcome. It is an alienation arising from an increasingly disjunctive relationship
between expectations of the mind and experiences of the body; a dichotomy accentuated by
internet use, ... read morecontemporary entertainment, and late-capitalist paradigms. I have arrived
at my interdisciplinary art practice through my experience with a form of metaphysical
alienation called depersonalization—a state of detachment where one’s
body, thoughts, and feelings seem unreal, artificial, or as not belonging to oneself.
The depersonalized individual is divested of their typical emotional and perceptual
faculties wherein an inability to place the self into context gives way to psychological
vertigo. The depersonalized state is a rich example of coping mechanisms for unstable,
twenty-first-century orientations to the self, spatial relationships, time, and emotion.
The work has found a suitable home in virtual reality and computer-generated video to
explore these concepts. Familiar environments are made strange through their conversion
to a virtualized form and an exaggeration of their properties allowed by their
digitality: a grocery store is ever more vibrant and organized, an escalator ride never
ends, a virtual dentist administers too much laughing gas. The viewer and the art work
are linked by their mirroring of one another—and in fact occupy the same space in
the real and virtual environment—thereby increasing believability,
disorientation, and affect.
MFA Thesis
2020read less
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