Immersive technologies generate our world into a digital cosmos, our perception is expanded and alienates us from the physical-analogous reality. As part of the seminar "The Window to Code" at the Kunstakademie Münster, students have been studying the history of photo-making in order to gain an expanded view of current artificial art worlds. Just as Leonardo Da Vinci used a Camera Obscura to draw, René Descartes explored with the interplay of eye and consciousness with it - the Cyclorama can be seen retrospectively as a precursor of VR videos. With this background, the students have questioned the development of virtual reality and have developed new artistic works that deal with the construction of reality and the influence of virtual spaces, inviting to investigate the ambivalent effects of digital pseudo-worlds within the context of thought experiments.
 

Source of the objects, installations and etchings of Katharina-Sophie Heck is linguistic material. In the artists work, the construction of objects through classical, every daylife and artificial material is based on the montage of linguistic material. Like an objectification, the artist looks in her works for possibilities to realize and develop the linguistic creation, the object itself and to approach a materialized translation of poetic fragments. The works that arise from this process, embody the (material-) conflict of the transformation from a metaphor to a thing and swing between fiction and reality.

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In her work, which is characterized by pattern and ornament, Judith Kaminski deals with figure-and-ground-relationships as well as with illusion. While contemplating, the image planes are switching back and forth, so that fore- and background can not be defined exactly.The pithy shapes are like a carrier or a medium for pictorial information - as it were a canvas on the canvas, a legitimate space for her floral motif. More and more these figures or shapes obtain an autonomous character and arise independently in her work.

www.judith-kaminski.de

Juli Lee wants to take the viewer into a small world of narrative-installative compositions, which plays with the experience and memory of space: when you enter an uncommon and empty space, the emptiness can be filled with own nearly forgotten memories: a moment is created, which hovers between imagination and memory and Juli starts to tell a story.

chestnutpear.wixsite.com/meinewebsite

Tamara Malcher works with painting, video, words, sound. A cyclic element in her works is the preoccupation with unusual perspectives. Her works point to the limits of the usual view in the workaday life which goes along with an inevitable selection. The focus is directed onto unconscious behavior patterns and patterns of thought as well as onto disregarded moments. A differentiated weighting of selective contents out of a major context make for a different perception of the usual and the ordinary. In her work for the Künstlerhaus Dortmund Tamara Malcher deals with the perception of the ‘here and now’.

tamaramalcher.wordpress.com

Raoul Morales-Márquez currently works and experiments with all kind of video and noises, often after the Deconstruction concept from Heidegger and Derrida. In his work, the social-political critic is not treated with subtlety,  but straight and hard. Raoul tries to close the gap between what we as „piece of art“ know, and the visitor. In his work, people are encouraged to touch, participate, turn off and on everything and finally be as loud as they want to.

vimeo.com/raoulmm

Cristina Prims Vicario works with the links and connections from our world(s). Whether the brutal reality or a dream world, one lives and dies and films. She depicts different situations by the means of images in movement; from food waste to the refugee crisis or weapon exports, but also dreamy, colourful imaginary sceneries or even space.
In this exhibition she works with concepts such as depth, extra-terrestrial beings, and the frontiers between reality and fiction. They – we - are between us.

vimeo.com/prims

The human body constitutes the center of Lioba Schmidt's art works. She examines the body in respect of its ways of expression and seeks to analyse what happens inside of the body whilst what is transferred to the outward appearance. Human interaction, social representation, personal sensations or dance depict parts of her investigations. These areas of interest also often deal with underground scenes, outsiders or subcultures. Lioba Schmidt's recent art works focus on body modification involving modifications of indiginous peoples up to mainstream phenomena.

www.klasseklausmerkel.de/studierende/lioba-schmidt

Veronika Simmering concentrates on beings and bodies - their motions and fluids. She is interested in creating something seemingly alive. At the same time she localises different facets of bodily experiences for example, disgust. It often seems revolting at first sight, but on closer examination interesting, intimate, and even beautiful. Simmering displays and explores her own perception, ever challenging her own reality. An important aspect of her work is to find tension and absurdity in everyday objects and situations.
 

Lisa Tschorn likes the immersion in the stream of internet consciousness. She lives in webs and bubbles. Within her artworks she explores possibilities of communication and the production of meanings. Her works are experiments on reality using language and other materialities.

Lisatschorn.eu