Review: Artlink "Experimenta Recharge: 6th International Biennial of Media Art"
Review by Ben Byrne
March 2015
Experimenta Recharge scans the world of media art today, characterising it as increasingly transnational and post-digital in nature. Examining the role of the digital as a pervasive mediator of global culture, the show demonstrates the now commonplace blurring and traversing of boundaries between analogue and digital, actual and virtual.
ParMaitha Demithan’s Aiyal, Sanawat and To The Moon document members of her family using digital knits of flatbed scans of sections of their bodies. The results are otherworldly portraits, radiant in their colour and stillness. Alongside them was Cake Industries’ Simulacrum consisting of miniature busts of fifteen subjects, whose portraits the artists took using 3D printing technology. Nearby, Svenja Kratz’s Contamination of Alice: Instance #8 features a mask of a girl’s face grown from cells containing the DNA of Alice, a girl who died in 1973 and donated her body to science. All these works raise questions around the nature of humanity and its relation to the presence and representation of the human body, particularly when we are faced with the possibilities of being scanned, mapped and encoded.
Experimenta Recharge: 6th International Biennial of Media Art toured Australia in 2014–2016.