We turn to our digital devices for distraction, reward and companionship, often finding ourselves surrounded by stimulating images and symbols of paradise and fortune. While recognizing their artifice, we are still drawn by a primordial fascination. Increasingly, our relation to the world is mediated by its representation. Before the digital, imagination, memory and religion were already vectors of a world delineation.
Pierre Lévy defines this process as virtualization. “Virtualization is not a derealization, but an identity mutation. (…) [it] is one of the main vectors of creating reality.”
Like a dive, space-time coordinates in the virtual are wavering. In the water, we lose our weight, time has another speed, we are drawn into a space not defined by the water, but by other physical borders (natural or artificial).
A Bigger Splash (1967, David Hockney) freezes the time of the plunge and uses its framing to define a specific American lifestyle territory. El Chapuzon expands the time of the plunge transposing past, present and future, while compressing space in the materiality of the installation, without referring to a social-economical terrain.
Virtual, from virtus, meaning strength, potency, can’t be “reduced to a process of disappearing or dematerialization.“ This work interprets the virtual as a dynamic that is shared with reality, being attentive to its evanescence, mutability and individuality, as a fluctuating moment, assuming it as another way of being present.