I spent time at various museums in NYC over Thanksgiving Break, and took note of a few new art works in light of having created my own digital art throughout this semester.
At the Whitney Museum in particular, I noticed a couple different video installations that had clearly been influenced by digital practices. In one particular piece, I watched a series of 'Branded Zombies', which were more or less digital characters and faces made in a 3D animation space (perhaps Blender, though it was hard to say). These zombies wandered about with very creepy branded skulls which read "Netflix", "Amazon", "GM", etc., and came in and out of the viewer's perspective of a hellscape. I wish I had taken note of which piece this was. I later looked for it on the Whitney's online art webpage (https://whitney.org/artport) and failed to find it, but instead stumbled on this:
Rachel Rossin: THE MAW OF (2022)
If you click on the link, the piece is a fully digital environment that also allows you to connect to an AR space where the same, strange animated figure appears.
Or, according to the Whitney's own description:
"Rachel Rossin’s THE MAW OF is a transmedia story — a narrative unfolding across multiple platforms and formats — that reflects on the ways in which our bodies and minds are increasingly merging with and altered by technology. Central to the animation is a ghostly female figure, rendered in the style of Japanese manga, who wanders through a landscape of layered interfaces, symbols, and codes associated with technological and organic systems."
My experience in these digital places has tended to be still somewhat glitchy, and that's no different with even this professional art project (at the Whitney en plus, oo la la), as it was for my own AR project. However, the hosting is obviously much more smooth here, and I was able to walk a bit through the AR environment, with a blue/solar light surrounding all the images. The environment switches between this kind of infared color and a non-filtered shot, with sparkling lights around.
All in all, I think the experience is somewhat open-ended and more ambient than object-focused, which both the popular Pokemon GO and my own AR work tended more towards. I think this makes for a more artistic and slightly less gimickey-seeming experience. At the same time, I do feel like the claim that one can draw out a story here is somewhat far-fetched and could use more concretizing. I like a lot of the designed and animated figures in the piece, and I think the space is very well done and has a strange, uncanny feel, but can't help but feel the technology isn't fully used to tell a clear story.