MIRRORED REALITIES

-- Masters Thesis Project for Trinity Laban, 2015 --

“On reading Nicholas Carr’s The Shallows (2010) I became acutely aware of my relationship with the internet; how I interact with it and how it interacts with me. I came to notice that I existed in two different states of being.”

Mirrored Realities is a project of two halves.

Mirrored Realities practical project was structured into a one-month period of exploration. Sidonie spent two weeks in ‘networked reality’ documenting her encounters through film and gathering evidence in the form of blog posts and digital images. She then spent a further two weeks in ‘singular reality’, disconnected from the Internet in any form, exploring her rural surroundings through walking and filming these experiences on a super 16 camera. She gathered evidence in this reality with photographs on a disposable camera and recording her thoughts in a journal. The final product of Mirrored Realities’ practical exploration originally existed as an installation in a gallery space. ‘Evidence’ was displayed for audiences to discover as they explored the space and they were invited to see a showing of two films made from the realities. These films were shown simultaneously intending to provoke comparisons between them.

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Mirrored Realities written thesis reflects on the practical project of the same name, beginning by offering an understanding of the personal nature of the work and how the artist’s self remains present throughout. It draws on artists such as Lucy Lippard, Richard Long and Gay McAuley to explore the artist’s relationship to place, debating the worth of regionalism and memory within this field, as well as arguing for the significance of walking as a movement principle to solidify this relationship further. By examining the use of the Internet as a medium within the work, this investigation aims to define the presence of virtual space both within the project and in other recent artworks, which then offers a framework to discuss the dualistic qualities of the work. This study concludes by examining how Mirrored Realities can be placed within contemporary art practices, offering a comparison between the dualisms observed within the work and the dualistic nature of metamodernist art.

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Contact me if you are interested in reading or watching this project, or keep updated with my lecture schedule on twitter.