A new online group exhibition curated by Julie Walsh focuses on how the representation of the body is influenced by digital media. Synthetic Corpo-Reality is organised by MEET Digital Culture Centre in Milan, Italy with the support of Fondazione Cariplo.
The MEET (Milan) virtual exhibition space showcases eleven digital artworks by artists whose work connects the physical and digital realms, and for whom the body is intrinsically interwoven with their practice. Some of the works on display examine anatomy, body language and traversions through space, looking at how these are fragmented and expanded through hardware and software. Other exhibited artworks explore the politics of the body: the tension between defined identity categories and the more amorphous reality; surveillance and data collection. Further themes addressed by the exhibition include birth, death and transcendence in the age of the algorithm.
The exhibiting artists are Miao Xiaochun, Zhou Xiaohu, 
Claudia Hart, Tamiko Thiel, Rebecca Allen, Auriea Harvey, 
Sophie Kahn, Martina Menengon,Tim Deussun and Manuel Zimmer, 
Carla Gannis and Nancy Baker-Cahill. Gannis presents Origins of The Universe: Dimensioning, a VR and video version of her 2019 sculpture series, which in turn was inspired by Gustave Courbet’s 1896 painting L’Origine Du Monde. The work features an avatar exploring the origins of the universe within a multi-scalar digital space. For Kahn’s work Divers the artist worked with a group of Butoh dancers at Brooklyn’s Pioneer Works; as part of Butoh training, dancers learn to fall; Kahn scanned this practice of falling before sculpting the resulting scans “to erase the effects of gravity”. The Divers project was originally presented as part of Kahn’s solo virtual show Dematerialised. Hart presents Alice Inside, her fourth work inspired by Alice in Wonderland. The work is inspired by Jorge Luis Borges, and features an avatar whose movements correspond to the movements of the space they reside in.
