Torsten Hink

SIMULTANEOUS SPACES AND UTOPIA, 2019

VR experience for HTC Vive

Initial situation:

As a painter, I am fundamentally concerned with the question of how artistic approaches can develop utopias. Is it possible to detach oneself from one‘s own space of experience and really develop something new, or does one derive one‘s own imagery from the existing and actually abstract only what is already known?

At first glance, the subject seems as old as the black square with which Malevich sought to elevate the supremacy of pure perception over the objective in art. The constructivists wanted to become „creators“ through mathematically founded construction and categorically rejected naturalistic replicas and abstraction. But it is becoming more topical again, as the relationship between derived, canonized aesthetics and (creative) originality is currently being re-explored. In the painterly work I deal with this question in a formally simple way by developing such forms, which elude a concrete interpretation, change between construction and abstraction, and thus question the ambivalence of utopia. In „Forms Research“ I use both simple pictorial means as well as various algorithms which create autonomous continuously randomized forms, solids or lines.

VR:

Within this experiment, another offshoot was created in which these forms were transferred into the virtual space and animated there continuously by an algorithm. Using VR glasses, you can enter this room and then go into the interior of the form. The work thus ties in with the initial question and plays with the spatial intermeshing of utopias and familiar surroundings. In a randomized animation, the constant movement of space is addressed, in which at the same time fictive and familiar, private and public, inner and outer as well as multiple points of view overlap. Insofar, the virtual space itself can also be read as a link between utopia and heterotopia (according to Foucault).

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