Text by CLOT Magazine
London-based Greek artist Eva Papamargariti presents Uh everything looks so fresh – Oh everything is so rotten!, a new VR exhibition at NICOLETTI Digital. Papamargariti’s project is conceived as a simulated environment in which viewers are invited to navigate across a series of CGI rooms comprising films, digital prints and sound. With a background in architecture and visual communication, Papamargariti’s work approaches digital and physical environments by exploring themes related to simultaneity, the merging and dissolving of our surroundings with the virtual.
Uh everything looks so fresh – Oh everything is so rotten! Takes its cue from Adolfo Bioy Casares’ novel La invención de Morel (1940) and like in the novel Papamargariti uses and interrogates paradigm-shifting technologies like simulation, virtual reality and brain-reading devices. Papamargariti creates a virtual environment populated by hybrid, ominous creatures living in a digital limbo that is envisioned as both a disaster and a space of reflection and respite from continual progress.
My interest in biological systems has always fascinated me in the science fiction context, but the recent years have become an important part of my artistic research and practice. Biological systems can become guides and set examples of how other systems develop and act. Observing them from macroscale to microscale, they embed sets of characteristics (in form and function) that are extremely intriguing and relate with notions of adaptation, metamorphosis, resilience, and entropy (among others) that feed my practice and interest me extensively, Papamargariti told CLOT Magazine in an interview.
Uh everything looks so fresh – Oh everything is so rotten! is on view at NICOLETTI Digital from July 14, 2020.
