Ground

    Rebecca Aston

    Grounded in a shifting terrain, living in the sediments of the past, disorientation becomes the only thing to hold onto. Ground is a Virtual Reality piece that celebrates groundlessness and change, claiming disorientation as a positive state to feel your way into or through. Within the work, texture is used as a way to rethink a ground—the present moment—that is in constant flux, steeped in history and memory. The perception of texture exists at the border of sight, touch and sound, and so it becomes a device to recall and remix time and space. Ground uses the medium of Virtual Reality to think about perception and embodiment. Following a meandering line through abstract painting, color theory, minimalist sculpture and light art, Ground uses abstraction, light and the relationship between bodies and the worlds they are perceiving. A gaze controller allows a user to change and animate the virtual world by moving their head and looking around, which results in visual and aural textures that build up to a synaesthetic and embodied experience. The work appears as a performative demonstration within the Chimera Garden exhibition. Read more here about the inspiration for the work and the processes involved in creating it.


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    LIVE ONLINE

    ON SITE

    Goldsmiths, University of London
    St James Hatcham Building

    • Ground - Thursday 17 Sep 18.20
    • Ground - Friday 18 Sep 17.00
    • Ground - Saturday 19 Sep 11.50
    • Ground - Saturday 19 Sep 17.30
    • Ground - Sunday 20 Sep 15.45

    Rebecca Aston

    Rebecca Aston examines the relationship between personal lived experience and collective historic records. Memory and temporality are central to her art practice, both as subject matter and as medium — namely capture technologies, computation and the moving image. In addition to engaging with symbolic and narrative elements, she works on the level of the affective and perceptual, thinking about visceral responses to light, sound, motion and color. As a Zimbabwean artist, she questions narratives of whiteness, especially within settler colonial identities and the empires that bred them; Zimbabwean history is central source material in much of her work. Rebecca is an artist and creative technologist, within both her commercial and artistic work she utilizes a range of technologies, from the web to virtual reality. Born and raised in Zimbabwe, she is currently based in London. She lived and worked as a web developer in the USA after obtaining a BA in Fine Art from Yale.

    Tags
    Expanded Terrains  Non-directional travel  Experiential array   performance  VR  3D  

    Rebecca Aston

    Rebecca Aston examines the relationship between personal lived experience and collective historic records. Memory and temporality are central to her art practice, both as subject matter and as medium — namely capture technologies, computation and the moving image. In addition to engaging with symbolic and narrative elements, she works on the level of the affective and perceptual, thinking about visceral responses to light, sound, motion and color. As a Zimbabwean artist, she questions narratives of whiteness, especially within settler colonial identities and the empires that bred them; Zimbabwean history is central source material in much of her work. Rebecca is an artist and creative technologist, within both her commercial and artistic work she utilizes a range of technologies, from the web to virtual reality. Born and raised in Zimbabwe, she is currently based in London. She lived and worked as a web developer in the USA after obtaining a BA in Fine Art from Yale.