Megan Beckwith. Juried Artist
Constellations
WebXR on the Styly platform
Artist Statement
Fleshed Networks is a non-linear narrative environment that explores intersections between the real, virtual, human, technical and ecological forms. On entering the space, the user finds a visceral network surrounding them; the networks are cyborg bodies created by merging human and non-human elements. Purple flesh is embedded with technical and organic parts that appear to look down on the user. In Fleshed Networks, the idea of ‘now’ is changed from the historical notion of being present. The user experiences a sense of concurrent existence in multiple locations, creating a feeling of being in different places simultaneously. These dual presences, challenges the linear progression of time and space which allows for a more fluid temporal experience. The user exists in their real environment, and their avatar inhabits the VR space.
Styly link: Fleshed Networks
About the artists
BECKWITH is a transmedia artist academic who combines dance and digital media. Her practice explores the intersection of physicality and technology through the figure of the post-human cyborg. Beckwith often combines dance performance with technologies such as stereoscopic 3D illusions, motion capture, virtual and augmented reality. She creates digital performances combining the body and 3D animation in a process that layers one over the other, re-working the human figure into new forms. The Age newspaper described Beckwith as a “trailblazer” and in a review of her performance work ‘Parallax’ described how “the projections are manifestations of desires and nightmares that leap into the audience. The computer game culture magazine Kill Screen wrote that her work ‘opens a rabbit hole of accelerating conceptual possibilities’. Beckwith lectures in Digital Dance and is the current Digital Studio Production Fellow at the Victorian College of the Arts, Faculty of Fine Arts and Music at the University of Melbourne, Australia.
Credits: Dr Megan Beckwith