ImmerWorld
This installation makes a tangible statement of the synchronous, parallel existences of realities, interwoven, yet never simultaneously apprehensible in their singular distinctiveness. There is an assemblage of an allegedly objective, a subjective and a virtual world, in which the separation between the digital and the real appears utterly obsolete, yet all is conceived as a unity. By exposing the subject to wearing the VR goggles inside a transparent plexiglass cube, the viewer may be set into the awkward position of a voyeur, grasping on the subjects vulnerability while deducing those closed, unreachable, impermeable realities. Upon entering the vitreous cube, a virtual world is revealed in which a dystopian sci-fi parable is told in five acts, inspired and illustrated by systematically mined images, extracted from the virtual world of the internet and transformed by algorithmic pareidolia, artificial neural networks that identify patterns in the image and amplify them iteratively. Each act includes an aspect of the «ImmerWorld’s» nature; an artificial, hyper-individual VR into which the people of the future immerse themselves. While the physical reality of this society loses the momentum, the artificial life gains intensity and finally culminates in the algorithmic simulation of death in the fifth act. Men can now completely surrender to the «ImmerWorld» and let life be lived algorithmically.
This work is the first installation of Diana Wotruba (cognitive neuroscientist) through her artistic inquiry «It am I», in which artificial and human intelligence are juxtaposed in opposition. By means of poetic and immersive installations the nature of the silicon and the artificiality of the carbon shall be dismantled tangible for critical controversy.
