Anaïs Goupy, Nadine Kolodziey & Christiane Peschek: Bliss Mode

The body nestles in this narrow gap between dimensions. On the one side firm and warm, completely physical and surface. Maybe that’s skin? On the other side no clues at all. An infinite space of possibilities that opens up shimmering and seductively. Somehow very cute creatures flutter around, crumbling into stardust, which is made out of pixels here. Something’s not right – it looks completely unnatural. And we are already caught in the trap of wanting to believe that the real and physical world is more real than the great sphere of digital creatures, features and futures.

Anais Goupy focuses on the female body, which is exposed to countless attributions and appropriation in the virtual world. The ambivalence is enormous when gestures of seduction and deformation overlap and trigger completely contradictory feelings. Nothing is natural here, but the fake is real! Goupy’s works on canvas have a plasticity, the structure of the surface is relief-like and painterly. The colored dimension, however, defies traditional techniques and imports AI-generated image data.

Christiane Peschek uses the algorithm that is actually supposed to spy on and track her as a user on social media. From the flood of images that wash around her – based on her own search queries – Peschek extracts dog motifs, optimizes them with filters and transfers the cutest, cotton candy-like creatures from the digital world to the analogue one. The hard, smooth screen is both a hinge and a mirror, but the canvas is soft and the cuteness is as real as the puppies are synthetic.

Nadine Kolodziey confidently crosses the boundaries of the physical and digital worlds in both directions. Fantastic plants and shapes grow in her gardens and thrive from virtual spheres into the exhibition space. Captured on aluminum dibond, we can imagine what infinite expanses they come from. Small, precious objects – called netsuke – have their origins in the upper bourgeois culture of Japan in the 17th century. These precious items are wormholes into the other dimension in which we feel cyber and are no longer entirely sure whether all the beautiful emotions thrive in the body or in hyperspace.

Bliss Mode is a practice, it can be switched on and off like a display. The digital sphere expands the scope and allows new, sensual and aesthetic experiences. It’s not just intoxicating consumption, cheerful surfaces and an endless stream of ideals and feelings that are available here. Ethical, cultural and political questions will also have to be asked and answered. At the interface between the physical and virtual worlds, the artistic work of Peschek, Goupy and Kolodziey manifests the fact that both dimensions can no longer be viewed separately. Our visual experience has long taken digital aesthetics into account; the view of the body, nature and society is shaped by them and non of them exists without the other. The possibilities of the future are negotiated here, tested and celebrated as an expansion to be redesigned.

 

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