Surrealism Me: The Future of Reality: Post-Truths, Digital Twins, and Doppelgängers

Curated by: Victoria Szabo Gustavo Alfonso Rincon

In The Production of Space Henri LeFebvre described the complex ways in which space is perceived, conceived, and experienced. This mutually constitutive and dynamic social process affects both the built environment and socio-cultural relations within it. For decades theorists of both urban geographies and the landscapes of cyberspace have taken inspiration from his ideas to think about how spaces become places at a moment in time. Artwork that engages concepts of space and place has been energized by thinking through these dynamic relations in installations, site-based experiences, virtual art, and other forms. Today the boundaries between these productive forces of space and experience are increasingly blurred, as physical space and virtual space boundaries overlap; space design itself becomes generative and democratized; and lived experience within them is both participatory and reactive. Virtual worlds, 3D models, animations, reality capture imaging, sensors, and intelligent agents of all kinds are converging to create post-truths, digital twins, and doppelgängers to the material world, and are co-constituting our experiences within and outside of it. How are artists engaging information as data – structuring new grammatical languages as code, formulating the future of reality from A.I. into the era of Quantum computing?

The artwork we received in response to our call includes works that explore some of the challenges the future holds through media practices that engage the systems they critique. The artists here use computer graphics and interactive techniques such as motion capture, virtual reality (VR), mixed reality (MR), artificial intelligence (AI), facial recognition, and 3D printing in their work. They investigate the psychic, ethical, and social implications of emerging technologies by creating interactive and immersive installations that both participate in, and critique, emerging media forms. Their works blur boundaries between the physical and virtual, questioning identity and perception, the nature of everyday experience, and foregrounding environmental and ethical concerns around these interventions. In The Future of Reality, we ourselves become avatars and intelligent agents within these hybrid media systems, looking back at ourselves and our histories, gazing into uncertain mirrors, and looking ahead to increasingly seamless, incursive, responsive, and hyper-curated media landscapes, objects, personae, and relationships.

We hope as you explore the exhibit online you take the time to visit the artists’ websites to find further documentation, and, fittingly for an online exhibition, sometimes even try out the works themselves. This exhibition is featured on a kiosk in the SIGGRAPH 2024 Art Gallery, and we plan to hold a DAC SPARKS session with many of the artists in September 2024. And we encourage you to explore the DAC Website for more content and events from SIGGRAPH’s year-round digital art community. Thanks to all our artists and DAC members and jurors for your worko on this show!