The unabating pervasion of the digital complicates our lived experience and obfuscates our identity. We routinely construct, then perpetuate, digital facsimiles of ourselves by circulating them around immaterial, pseudo-social networks – we effectively hold residence among a digital landscape.
But crucially, this transposition of ourselves into the digital domain incurs a lossy, distorting transformation; we do not maintain our corporeality but become flattened, mutated reflections. Yet still, in nature of digitally storing and transmitting our memories, thoughts and ideas, perhaps our spirit – our identity -- survives this intermedium transmission, becoming preserved in perpetuity and obtaining a ‘virtual immortality’.
Maybe, through this idea of a ‘virtual immortality’, we have managed to apprehend the ancient cosmological conceptions of the afterlife, whereby one’s spirit and soul – the essence of their self – extends beyond their material body. Resultantly, we’re moved to consider whether the absurdity of digital possibility strengthens or subverts religion and traditional culture more generally.
Our group is relating this absurd, paradoxical concept of ‘virtual immortality’ through a recorded, nonverbal drama performance, expressing notions of the physical and living through dress and objects, and translating the immaterial digital concepts with mirrors – both clear and obscured, lighting, and superimposed projections.
Xiaochen Ge: Art Director | DING-LING: Director / Cinematographer | Inigo Campbell-Lange: Writer / Sound Designer | Xianwei Zhou: Cinematographer / Producer
