lost to the digital ether

2023
exhibited at and comissioned by Das Weisse Haus
Vienna, AT

(c) Xenia Snapiro

For their latest hybrid installation, commissioned by das weisse haus, room69 responds to the idea around a reformatting of archives. How does archival material sit within the expandable walls of virtual space? How does virtuality situate itself in the cultural temporality of das weisse haus?

Within the collective’s oeuvre, notions of virtual world-building, collectivity, and an ever-expanding artist process are central to their work. For the installation, room69 meditates on loss and forgetting and creates a virtual archive as a liminal space for collecting and displaying artwork. Over the duration of a year, the collective has (will) build an immersive stage in which artworks from the collective are archived, but in doing so, are forgotten and lost to the digital ether — to be found and discovered over time.

In the created world, we choose to intentionally lose sight of our artistic work, to blur our practice with the physical space of das weisse haus. As we expand this world and this work, we fade between invention and reinvention, using rendering algorithms and raytracing techniques to mystify the virtual landscapes we occupy. In this process, we seek to evolve beyond the binary and fictionalize the white cube. At first glance, viewers begin at a point of nothingness, slowly moving into the endless possibilities that lie between life and fiction. Using the digital realm as an (in)complete space that grows and evolves over time, connecting to our practice of open world-building.