This ‘Cybaroque’ installation merges tradition and technology - the Baroque and cyberspace - as both privilege artifice and simulation. In our increasingly technologically mediated world my work questions the implications of ‘the technological gaze’: how new technologies, including biotechnologies, as well as simulated realities, may affect our ideas about gender and identity.
It is intended to be alluring yet disturbing, familiar yet alien. It draws on Jean Baudrillard’s ideas about simulation and his claims that simulation does not mask or hide reality but is reality and furthermore produces reality. The work is also informed by cyberfeminist theory - particularly the ideas postulated by Donna Haraway in her Cyborg Manifesto. Her cyberfeminist utopian dream envisions the liberating and transformative potentiality of the ‘posthuman’ through the dissolution of traditional, gendered binaries which have associated the masculine with the mind, culture and technology and the feminine with the body, nature and the organic. This installation is therefore composed of many symbolic elements, fusing technology with sculpturally feminine forms - such as an oversized Petri-dish which references scientific experimentation, but also, more importantly, suggests a site of gestation - a site of potentiality.
Overall, this work takes the form of a mixed-reality installation: part real, part virtual; part utopian, part dystopian. I have tried to construct a space in which to reflect upon the nature of reality in a cybernetic world: a site of instability where the absolutisms of a dichotomous value system are replaced by a compromised vision.
It both sets up dichotomies, drawing distinctions between the physical materiality of a perceived ‘real’ space and the immateriality of an aestheticised ‘virtual’ space, yet then blurs these boundaries as what is real and what is virtual, what is natural and what is artificial, where the body ends and technology begins, become less clear. My work therefore aims to simultaneously secure and challenge the viewer’s sense of reality, complicating the status of representation as reflecting or constructing the real.
