Artist statement

My practice explores interactive environments as sites of altered consciousness, using spatial-temporal distortion to move away from the binary and dualism, towards a multiplicity of self. In this work, the visitor or participant can temporarily embody virtual forms, in spaces informed equally by ancient and ritualistic practices as by contemporary consciousness research. I explore the physical energy exchange between self and environment, and the brain/body perception of this exchange, with the aim of moving towards animist understandings of digital and physical ecologies, and a more interconnected ecological perception. My background in Cognitive Neuroscience infiltrates all of my work. I view immersive artwork as potential sites for expanding neuroscientific consciousness research.

I merge analogue and digital processes as a mode of grounding the digital in our physical world, while resisting purely mimetic applications of disembodied digital technologies.

Aether: Interactive VR (Images: stills from ‘Aether’)

Aether is an interactive VR journey designed as an individual experience. It is an interaction with an organism made up of the basis of all organic matter on earth; this matter, in the virtual space, takes form as a circular thread. This thread holds the essence of the space, the air, the breath, and matter visualized as energy and light.

The participant interacts with a real-time biophysics simulation of a cyclic carbon molecule as it transforms from its original vibrating molecular form into pure light essence.

Each individual’s interaction with this space is different, and their interactions change the space itself. They become both visitor and performer. A guiding spoken-word narrative leads the inhabitant of the virtual space through a multi-sensory journey, weaving together dream fragments, emergence of non-being, and an awareness of the breath.

I collaborated with the Intangible Realities Laboratory and ArtSci International to adapt a virtual reality space using a real-time computational biophysics simulation (from their project Isness), into a digital art experience. I was interested in how interactive virtual environments could induce mystical-type “peak” experiences: how could this push forward consciousness research, and could this be used to alter ecological perception?

I created this VR experience as speculative stimuli for future consciousness research, addressing the question: how can immersive art expand the boundaries of the contemporary study of consciousness?

I tested ‘Aether: A Guided Journey in Virtual Reality’ in a pilot study with participants, gathering and analyzing data from their responses to the experience. Over the course of three weeks from April to May of 2021, a group of participants volunteered to experience the VR journey, with each participant attending a one hour session, followed by an open feedback session and administration of the MEQ30 questionnaire.

My final piece, ‘Under Aether,’ is a response to this project and research.

Short Description:

The Aether experience is a kind of scientific meditation, unraveling our attachment to our solid, individual, rational forms. Can understanding being as a dynamic, unfolding process connect us more meaningfully to our physical and digital ecologies?

Aether is a private and personal experience. It is one that is automatically changed by the presence of other bodies, and therefore is unique to each inhabitant. You determine how you would like to occupy this space and how you wish to interact with it. Your interactions change the space. Does the space also change you? At the same time as this experience is private and personal, it is also situated in a world of increasing surveillance, and decreasing physical space. These changes necessitate a quantum value shift in our culture.

Can mystical experiences of the virtual function as a glitch in the ecosystem of mainstream VR work, which often reinforces binaries and Cartesian dualistic views of the body, mind, and space? Can digital ecosystems bring us back to natural ecosystems, and can the two coexist symbiotically?

Under Aether

“Virtual Reality”, (Sound, Digital Print of Oil Painting on Silk Georgette, Painted Wood), 180cm x 145cm

Under Aether is a manifestation of my Virtual Reality project Aether. The sound and textile installation is an exploration of how transient experiences get mythologized, and how this in itself constitutes a form of virtuality. Sounds recorded from the VR experience play out into the space surrounding the textile.

Description:

In viewing ourselves as cosmic, we can return to an animate understanding of the earth. Moving beyond binaries through speculative world-building is a form of created agency.

The cosmological tapestry of all our ecosystems contains folds: folds of time, of space, of bodies, of thought. In creating ripples in these folds, glitches in the hegemonic codification of this tapestry into static parts, suddenly there appear liminal spaces in which to rebuild reality.

A digital print of an oil painting onto fabric creates a virtual representation of another object onto a tangible, physical, woven material. This textile can provide many functions, both practical and abstract: as a visual focal point, an object to divide space, an obfuscation of what is on the other side.

Under Aether from Anna Stroe on Vimeo.

…………………………….

Anna Linnea Strøe

I am an interdisciplinary artist originally from Denmark and currently working in London. My art practice explores interactive environments (including virtual environments) and ecological perception, and my primary research areas include embodied cognition, altered consciousness, and spatial perception. In 2018 I graduated summa cum laude from Tufts University, with a B.Sc. in Cognitive Neuroscience, and in 2021 I graduated from Central Saint Martins with an MA in Art and Science, with Distinction. I have previously worked in a Spatial Cognition Laboratory, and exhibited at venues including the Tate Modern and Freud Museum.

www.annastroe.com

Art, Creativity, Technology, video