VR installation-experience: Virtual Reality, social media platform VRChat, running time: 30′
VR installation: Anastasiia Vorobiova (idea, text and digital realisation); creative team: Chris Ross-Ewart – a sound designer, En Lai Mah – dance & choreography, Pavel Mazur – AI-generated art, Inaaya Sophia Bocken – Polish-language voice, Laura Goodier – English-language voice
Vorobiova’s project ties in with her interest in activities and theories of the Cybernetic Culture Research Unit (British experimental cultural theorist collective), and their Writings 1997-2003. The artist claims that reading CCRU texts has boosted her logical grasp of information, affording a deeper sense of information operating on a number of cerebral activity levels. Vorobiova explores global digitisation, human entanglement in processes related thereto, shifts in perspective (anthropocentric to non-human), and revised mythologies.
The artist began developing the general project outline two years ago; approximately one month prior to the opening of the exhibition in Białystok, she proceeded to build a Lemurian Time War world on the VRChat platform, the origins of the name referencing the title of an essay describing Lemuria*, and included in Writings 1997-2003. Therein, CCRU “documents” traces of Lemurian occultism, connecting the dots of disparate stories by individuals who have encountered hidden relics of non-human intelligence. Vorobiova writes:
My focal point of fascination with the adventure arises from the fact that the deeper I delve into the concept, the higher the number of intriguing details I discover. Did you know that lemurs are primates, just like us humans? There are not that many species amongst the assorted branches primates are perched on in the animal kingdom. If we truly are simian siblings, the lemurs have chosen their own path, and there are no other primate species. Yet in all actuality, this project is all about a magical journey across a virtual world. The intent is to activate and experience magic.
Spectators will be offered the opportunity to become participants in a Virtual Reality ritual – a journey across points of tension and/or places of power in the Numogram – a Decimal Labyrinth sourced in CCRU theories. In creating her world, the artist has also referenced theories by Burroughs, Blavatsky, Crowley, Lovecraft, Jung and Gibson; she combines science fiction with elements of theosophy and futurology, psychoanalysis with mysticism. Vorobiova invites her audiences to embark upon a journey and experience the world through her – virtual – body, to “get under her skin”, as it were. The activity also indirectly assumes a meditative exploration of the self, the option made possible owing to the complex virtual world created by the artist.
* Lemuria – a continent which – according to a hypothesis by zoologist Philip Sclater (proposed in 1864, overturned in the early 20th century) – had existed, then sunk into the Indian Ocean. According to Darwinists, the hypothesis explained the isolation of lemurs on Madagascar, and the presence of their ancestors’ fossilised remains in Africa and south-eastern Asia. Lemuria is also mentioned by occultists and esoteric believers in theories regarding ostensible origins of mankind.
