VIRTUALIZED AR
2020
AR video installation
Two monitors, 10:55min
Supporting developers: Leonid Barsht and Elisabeth Thielen
Dagmar Schürrer’s two-part video work VIRTUALIZED captivates through its materiality without being material. It seduces through its haptic without being tangible. It disturbs with organic forms and sounds that are largely artificial. The artist’s focus is on the virtual, which, in agreement with the philosopher Pierre Levy, she understands not as an illusion or fake, but as an additional level to the real and the current: a state of the possible, detached from material presence and geographical location – like dreams or memories a vague structure before actualization in the real, constantly in flux and multiply distributed, floating in transition and subject to its own laws. The artist experiments with augmented reality in a virtuoso manner: triggered by individual video stills, she lets her visual worlds break out of the screens. One enters a virtual space, a 3D collage of digital objects trouvés and creations of the artist. Here, the oscillation between concrete figurative and abstract content opens up a broad field of chains of associations that refer to the familiar and at the same time imply something new.
Text: Dagmar Schürrer & Maja Stark
About the artist:
Dagmar Schürrer is a media artist based in Berlin, Germany. The focus of her artistic practice lies on the transition where the digital and the analogue, the real and the virtual and the abstract and the figurative collide. In her digital works she reflects on issues related to our increasing commitment to digital technology and the societal and individual implications of digitalisation: on new concepts of space and time, the materiality of the digital, computerisation of thinking processes, on late capitalist paranoia and projected utopian futures. She assembles digitally generated objects and animations, text, drawings and sound to form intricate video sound montages, evocative of painting, collage or poetry. Ever unfolding in changing variations they are presented on screen, as installations or combined with new technologies such as augmented reality.
She holds a degree in Fine Art from Central Saint Martin ́s College of Art and Design in London, UK. Her work has been exhibited internationally, amongst others at the New Contemporaries at the ICA London, the Moscow Biennale for Young Art, Transmediale Vorspiel in Berlin, the Rencontres International Paris/Berlin at the Louvre Auditorium, and the Museum of Waste in Changsha, China. Her videos have been screened at numerous festivals: SUPERNOVA in Denver, the Seattle Film Festival, the Athens Digital Arts Festival, the Horn Experimental Film Festival in Israel, Tricky Women Festival in Vienna, or the Diagonale Film Festival in Graz. In recent years she received the Goldrausch Scholarship of the Senate of Berlin and was shortlisted for the Berlin Art Prize and the Tenderpixel Award in London.