Tabita Rezaire

Premium Connect (Real Deal), 2017

VR experience for HTC Vive

PREMIUM CONNECT (REAL DEAL) takes us within a VR rendering of Google sea, where some internet users suspect to have found the location of  Atlantis, as the online oceanic map shows uncanny markings on the ocean bottom. Five portals harbour the VR abyss to allow the wonderers to experience the video PREMIUM CONNECT and receive the wisdoms of divination and information communication technologies from a landscape of African spirituality. PREMIUM CONNECT envisions a study of information and communication technologies (ICT), exploring African divination systems, the fungi underworld, ancestors communication and quantum physics to (re)think our information conduits. Embracing the idea that ICT acts as a mirror of the organic world, capable of healing or poisoning depending on its usage and users, PREMIUM CONNECT investigates the cybernetics spaces where the organic, technologic and spiritual worlds connect. How can we use biological or esoteric systems to fuel technological process of information, control and governance? Overcoming the organism/spirit/ device dichotomies, this work explores spiritual connections as communication networks and the possibilities of decolonial technologies. Contrary to the Eurocentric-biased thinking, our information super highway might find its roots in African spirituality. Significant research attributes the birth of computing sciences to African divination systems such as the Ifa system of the Yoruba people of East Africa, which appears to be the origin of binary mathematics, today the functioning principle of computing sciences. Once again the origin of knowledge has been erased in favor of Western achievements.

We have much to recover in terms of connectivity and its potentialities. As science recently discovered the role of underground fungi networks used by plants to communicate and transfer information, ancient tradition have long known how to communicate with nature and download its knowledge. Meanwhile our cherished technologies are the results of institutional violence and until now reproduce them continually.

This study of dynamic networks from artificial, spiritual and biologic environments digs into the politics of possibilities, where a mystico-techno- consciousness could nurture a mind- body-spirit-technology symbiosis. 

PREMIUM CONNECT (REAL DEAL) was commissioned for UNREAL by NRW- Forum Düsseldorf Museum, Germany 

IMAGES

VIDEO LINK

ABOUT THE ARTIST

Tabita Rezaire (b.1989, Paris) is a French - of Guyanese and Danish descent - video artist, health-tech-politics practitioner and Kemetic/ Kundalini Yoga teacher based in Johannesburg. She holds a Bachelor in Economics (Paris) and a Master in Artist Moving Image from Central Saint Martins College (London). Rezaire’s practices unearth the possibilities of decolonial healing through the politics of technology. Navigating architectures of power - online and offline - her work tackles the pervasive matrix of coloniality and its affects on identity, technology, sexuality, health and spirituality.

Through screen interfaces, her digital healing activism offers substitute readings to dominant narratives decentering occidental authority, while her energy streams remind us to resist, (re)connect, and remember. 

Rezaire is a founding member of the artist group NTU, half of the duo Malaxa, and mother of the energy house SENEB. 

If you are interested in exhibiting or viewing this artistic VR experience, please send an email to us.

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