The first section of the gallery introduces Martina Menegon’s works: in her practice, Menegon creates intimate and complex assemblages of physical and virtual elements that explore the contemporary self and its synthetic corporeality. She experiments with the uncanny and the grotesque, the self and the body and the dialogue between the physical and the virtual realities, to create disorienting experiences that become perceivable despite their virtual nature.
In Rechannelled Corporealities, Menegon presents two digital sculptures with Augmented Reality capability from Untouched, her recent series of works: the artist captures herself via 3D Scanning technique, using her physical body in movement to performatively g̷̱͈͈̈́̾̂̿̒l̷̳̀i̴͎̾t̴͉̉̓c̴̘͙̗̺̐͆h̶͙͊̋̊͠͝ the resulting virtual one. Using 3D Scanning as an artistic medium, Menegon’s self-scanning technique becomes an intimate process, an extremely personal journey through the artist’s multiple digital selves and virtual identities. Untouched, these virtual three-dimensional selfies propose a new authentic and perceivable digital body, immobile yet constantly performing.
The second room of the gallery hosts the virtual installation of S()fia Braga’s Forehead Vulva Channel Research. Developing her artistic research between digital, post-digital and cyberstalking, Braga focuses her practice on themes such as the social impact of web interfaces and the subversion of centralized social media platforms.
The exhibition includes a video and two QR codes for Braga’s face filters, to be scanned and interacted with via mobile device. Reflecting on the artist’s most recent investigation, Forehead Vulva Channel Research expands on advanced studies concerning a vulva located in the forehead, that can be channelled through body awareness exercises and specialized technologies.
Functioning as a method to either enhance our AFK forms or to reinterpret the human bodies’ offline presence, Forehead Vulva Channel Research’s technical tools allow reaching a new awareness of one’s body and release hidden organs. Similar to nowadays mainstream mindful practices performed to reach an allegedly new and evolved self-consciousness, technology seems to become a rite of passage towards an enhanced awareness and an upgraded self.
