a body of data

VR installation
materials: VR headset, point clouds, code, synthesized voice. birch tree, bench, towels, magazines and coffee table.
dimensions: variable
year: 2019

"a body of data" is centered around human bodies in various forms, physical as well as their digital representations. discussed from the perspective of a artificial intelligence in the future trying to remember and explain what it meant to have a physical body, and the intricate connections between body and mind.

specifically the ritual of what humans used to call "sauna" is being discussed. why did we expose our bodies to the extreme conditions connected with the rituals of sauna: cold, heat, snow, steam, birch branch flagellantism and meditations. how did these extreme rituals affect our body, and how did these actions translate to our consciousness?

produced for the exhibition "ocean dwellers" in nordische botschaften, berlin, curated by solvej ovesen in 2019. the point cloud recordings took place in a deserted latvian black sauna in the late summer of 2018, during my RIXC residency at the RIXC rural lab.

screen recording of part of the VR experience. unfortunately the point clouds suffer quite hard from the vimeo compression algorithms, se image below for a more precise representation of the experience in VR.

click here to download the exhibition program in english, and click here for a german tagesspiegel article about the exhibition