HYPERTENSION

What are significant properties that constitute the human body and how will these properties change over time? If the human 1.0 experienced the technological revolution in the 20th century and the human 2.0 the digitalisation of itself and its surrounding environment, what will it look and feel like to become and be a human 3.0 in the 21st century and a more distant future? Is an organic evolution of human appearance long overdue and unavoidable, or is the transformation of our bodies only the inevitable consequence of technological revolutions of the last century? How will human interactions be structured and will they still be experienced viscerally and virtually? And what will be left behind as traces of our ephemeral physical existence, once our organic bodies will have become obsolete? HYPERTENSION presents video based works that imagine and question possible current and future dystopian scenarios of human expression, intimacy and body related issues in the virtual as well as in the analogue space. An important starting point of the presented artistic positions is the ability of digital image production to re-imagine the material world in a radically dematerialized way. The artists develop a multi-layered, both deeply figurative and abstract discourse that deals with the impossibilities of a sufficient representation of the physical, the corporeal of the human body. If the image is traditionally regarded as the representation of a remote presence in time or space, of a past state, and is thus considered an absent presence, the virtual image is the representation of an absence, since nothing has been except an absence that, once the distance between the image and the model has been removed, is always present: a hyper-image, a self-referential image that cannot imagine reality because it coincides with it. The virtual emerges as a multiple, potential and dynamic structure, which in the incessant timeline reveals points of reality that are not limited at the limit of specification, but are matrices of continuous differentiation, without any original reference model. Through their work, the artists disclose a world of the hyper-human and non-human at the same time, opening up places of longing of the human soul, which are filled with hope, yet above which a haze of uncertainty seems to lie. Questioning if human impulses and experiences go beyond the restraints of our organic being attached to the analogue space of the present, the works incorporate moments of glitch, reminiscent of the constant tension of the human organic nature in a hyper capitalized and digitized world.