Virtual Vanitas
“Since the world drifts into delirium, we must adopt a delirious point of view”
Jean Baudrillard
Virtual Vanitas conveys metaphorically a time-machine journey, an embarking on the internet, surfing the search engines between the trivial and the precious, the obscene and the remarkable, the essential and the random, retrieving, collecting and manipulating large parts of diverse virtual elements that float and sink in the virtual abyss of our digital screens. These are the representations of images from the whole history of humanity, from different times, and from all the corners of the world where the signifier and the signified exchange roles and create new memories. The iconography of the project has emerged from our addictive compulsive procedure of a systematic order of actions described as “Digital Tank Appropriation”
The project consists of a series of variable large scale artworks printed on cotton-wallpaper fabric, upholstered furnishings and smaller prints, that explore themes on familiar Greek myths such as, the Fall of Icarus, The Rape of Europe, not as a direct association to the particular storytelling, but more as a hybrid fabrication that aspires to stay true to the story through its deviations from the original narrative. The Virtual Vanitas series stand as the aftermath of our digital time-machine journey, a combination of decisive actions and accidental discoveries, an amalgamation of “Serendipity” and “Bricolage”, which aims to provide not merely a visual extravaganza of on-going symmetrical motifs, but also to comment on our most profound sensual relations and our deepest mystifications, on opulence and kitsch, on authority and narcissism on order and chaos. These digital motifs narrate, exalt and at the same time question any pretensions of the baroque in the digital age.