alter/native (composite vision)

The artists’ collaborative piece alter/native (composite vision) is based on ideas emerged and tests made during their Beyond Matter residency and responds to the current socio-political context in the region.

The work centers around a wallpaper of the now-iconic James Webb telescope image made from space, revealing the first galaxies that worked early on in the history of the universe, as well as stars that are currently forming planetary systems. Therefore, this image shows for the first time the most distant time in deep history that humans have ever reached to see. To the non-trained eye of an ordinary person, the image, when unfiltered, appears to represent a landscape of irregular dots. The image that is shown to the general public has been treated with filters so that different bodies in space would correspond to different colours on the image.

The James Webb image is juxtaposed with a pair of sports shoes equipped with exaggerated silicon sleeves, facing the images as though awaiting the viewer to jump into them, to take them to outer space. They reference the nostalgic era of the Space Race of the Cold War. Symbolically, the artists are commenting on the desire to go faster and become more destructive through the metaphor of jumping against the wall, while using up all the resources of our planet to achieve it. Panorama images such as the one referenced above, appeared at the same time as modern industrial society boomed, giving the viewer a sense of superiority over the environment. What are the consequences of augmented reality? What are the consequences of making space, time and experiences more superlative?