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'...We bury ourselves as though inside a metal sarcophagus, in a state of weightlessness, dreaming of living out all possible situations by the grace of the Digital' (Baudrillard, 1996: 35)

In the world's current technological climate, the proliferation of digital images entails sophisticated flows and hastened ways of production. Through this, we have come to mummify ourselves in the most intimate ways, seduced and disoriented by digital visual fragments. The digital form cannot be grasped in the same manner as an analogue one: it calls for a new attention. Digital recollections withdraw into a computerised language -- a language altogether different by its severing to the physical manifestation of its media predecessors. The fascination with digital images allows and inspires artists to create alternative realities and universes, resulting in works that become fascinations in themselves. Through the experience, there is a risk of death – a potential trap in the visual, in which the subject may displace out of the real and embody the alternative. The lived reality of the constructed spectators becomes a means for artists to establish new forms of dynamic encounters. These necessitate an involvement in a shared world via a network of symbolic reference. The sarcophagus becomes a metaphor for the containment of this experience.

MKII gallery is consequently divided into two distinct spaces: an introductory antechamber featuring participatory projections and a larger, silent, back space transformed into a 'sarcophagus'. Selected artists cohabit the latter with moving image pieces, which interact each other and the architecture of the space to create an image environ. The quietness gives way to a visual sensory overload. Additionally, a screening room features a small number of works that have sound. In this exhibition, artists engage with concepts demonstratively; their acknowledgements to technological form simultaneously pose questions to it.




Images courtesy the artists

1. John Russell, MCM_ants_universe.gif (still)
2. Rebecca Salvadori, my images are empty because my voice is full (still)