Immanentia03

Virtual reality has been a powerful factor in shaping our social and artistic environment since the 1970s. Today, innovations in digital technology have completely transformed film, video, and television: extraordinary special effects and three-dimensional imaging created using computer-based software are commonplace.

Otherworldly: Optical Delusions and Small Realities illuminates the phenomenal renaissance of interest among artists worldwide in constructing small-scale hand built depictions of artificial environments and alternative realities, either as sculpture or as subjects for photography and video.

In Immanentia: A Palm-Top Theatre Piece, patabotanical drawings of phantasmagoric trees and plants which intertangle interdependently with each other become a daydream world for a little girl found at the doorstep of a children’s house in Rose Cottage Home in Dickleburgh around 1890. She carries all of her worldly possessions with her – clutching only “a chestnut and a penny.”

The dream life has always been there. Mere shapes ever so clear and distinct. It is as if her little mind invented these shapes, labyrinths of the mind and for the mind - to drift away and try to lose oneself in - even though the mind cannot entirely trick itself. She always finds her way back. Abandonment. Mirroring. Pealing the thin layers of an onion, which in turn ends up as the perfect metaphor for the cluster of will, attention and dreams that we call consciousness. Sliding and hopping between different layers, she will perform together with you; a choreography, a game with no end and a music piece assembled into a sublime instrument to be played out by the sensitive user.

Concept and production by Performing Pictures and FoAM i3DG_Palm Top Theatre by Jitsuo Mase and Tom Nagae.