falling up

Ars Electronica, September 2020

ARTISTS: Versia Harris, Summer Mei Ling Lee x Laura Boles Faw, Lauren Lee McCarthy, Scott McKinney, Michail Michailov, Purin Phanichphant, Patricia Reinhart, Emilie Trice, Jullian Young

Amidst riots and racial tensions, divisive political rhetoric and a global pandemic, this past half year has been a time of turbulent uncertainty. These acute ruptures and moments of pain, conflict and the unknown have inadvertently led us to see anew our former and current realities, which may more or less be best described as “surreal”.

Devoid of conventional demarcations of time and social interaction, the phenomenon of sheltering-in-place (with its flowing stream of timeless days and self-governed isolation) engendered for many a pronounced disengagement from established norms, social systems and relationship to the physical world. Suddenly or very gradually, one is forced to exist in moments of continuity and discontinuity with the world, oscillating between various temporal strains. This new orientation affects both, but not only, the physiological and intellectual. It prompts us to see--by way of its disillusion of the recent past--the artifice that underlines our social practices, rules and collective behaviors.

Sparked by the conditions of our current moment, the exhibition, Falling Up, aims to explore the notion of artifice, its nature and how it behaves. How might the idea of artifice offer a way for us to embrace the paradoxes or dialectic of multiple realities? Instead of defining artifice as merely inauthentic or “fake”, this exhibition considers the poeticism behind its fiction and how it might go so far as to rescue today’s reality.

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