Neda Nikolic: Triggers

Vernissage: 06.06.2019, 7pm

Midissage: 15.06.2019 7:30 - 8pm “Wir sind Wien”
Performance by Neda Nikolic at Public Gallery Schwendergasse
Interactive VR Installation by Lieber Michael
Intervention by Super Nase und Co “This is Not Streichquartett!”
Finissage: 22.06.2019 6pm

Recreating the ludic virtual space

Not long ago, video games became the huge part of everyday life expanding to all available devices. The quality of graphics is becoming better with every single moment, leading rapidly to hyperealism. Knowing that virtual life can be easily immersed into real-life, the architecture in video games also tends to extend into the real-life landscape in order to create alternate, ludic reality.

On the other hand, it is the fact that virtual formations are based on pre-existing real-lifev architectural creations. Player immerses into virtual world as he/she is now able to rebuild, extend, change the virtual landscape. I was driven by pixelated aesthetics of video games, their color pallete, representation of characters and game physics. I liked the feeling to be a part of the WWII army in Battlefield 1, the game that gave me rounded up audio and visual experience of a real war, but also adored the magical landscape in Ark, action-adventure-survival video game. I should mention that I was more observer than a player.

Beside aesthetics, video games raised further questions of reality, virtuality, immersion. My idea was to recreate the virtual and transfer it into real-life experience, using the medium of mechanical objects, paintings and installations. Anyway, it seems to me as if all became a reversible process. If we take into account that games are founded on, or at least inspired by the real objects, situations and physics, we’ll be returned to the beginning. I am trying to involve the observer and made her/him a player allowing her/him to operate the objects.

Text by Neda Nikolic