Lauren Moffatt. Alterity Glimpsed Through a Prism

Muratcentoventidue Artecontemporanea is pleased to present "Alterity glimpsed through a prism", a solo exhibition featuring works by the Australian artist, Lauren Moffatt.
In recent years there has been an image revolution induced by the spread of "game engines", graphic software borrowed from video games, which now also influences art.
With the emergence of new technologies such as photogrammetry and LiDAR, a photographic image becomes a volume, a space, an experience. The exhibition intends to show these new image-worlds, presenting the work of Lauren Moffatt who is part of a new generation of artists who, with photographic tools, design virtual ecologies, avatar-portraits, hybrid bodies, embodied stories, new experiences in the form of immersive, playful and accessible installations.

Lauren Moffatt works between painting, performance and immersive technologies. Her works, often presented in multiple forms, explore the paradoxical subjectivity of connected bodies and the friction at the frontiers between virtual and physical worlds. Her works usually take the form of speculative fictions and environments, conceived using a mixture of obsolete and pioneering technologies, and which often occupy both physical and virtual space. Lauren builds detailed, complex and paradoxical universes populated by strange devices and artifacts.

Lauren completed her studies at the College of Fine Arts (AU), Université Paris VIII (FR), and at Le Fresnoy Studio National des Arts Contemporains. She lives and works between Valencia and Berlin. Her works have been screened and exhibited most recently at Hartware MedienkunstVerein (DE) Palais de Tokyo (FR), Villa Medici (IT), UNSW Galleries (AU), Daegu Art Museum (KOR), Museum Dr. Guislain (BE), SAVVY Contemporary (DE), FACT Liverpool (UK) The Sundance Film Festival (US) and at the ZKM (DE), at Q21 Freiraum (AT) and at La Gaïté Lyrique (FR).
Lauran Moffatt presents Alterity glimpsed through a prism
Lauren Moffatt, in the works on display, plays with the tension created between augmented reality and virtual reality. The works from the series Flowers for Suzanne Clair (named after a secondary character in J. G. Ballard's disaster fiction novel The Crystal World) creates a strange type of organic digitality which pivots on a process of collecting and digitizing plant specimens through an exchange between the physical and the virtual. Fusing photographic details of flowers with aleatory textures, these fictive plant species are windows to alterity glimpsed through a prism of biological life.

Suzanne Clair is a secondary character in The Crystal World, a disaster fiction novel written by J. G. Ballard in 1966. The story plays out in the foreground of an apocalyptic mineralization process that is consuming the world, originating in the depths of the Earth's jungles and spreading outwards, turning everything in its path to crystal. The story is told through the eyes of its protagonist, Edward Sanders, as he witnesses the doom unfolding. Suzanne Clair is a former lover of Sanders, and we encounter her through his lens as a tragic soul. Rather than as an apocalypse, Suzanne perceives the crystal as an opportunity for a different kind of life, and her optimism stands out awkwardly in contrast with Sanders and the other, mostly male, foreground figures. But removed from this narrow context, Suzanne's ability to perceive the crisis as something other than an immediate existential threat appears more interesting than the attitudes of the male counterparts who condescend her. It would have been interesting to see The Crystal World through Suzanne's eyes, to understand her as more than a prop character, and this nostalgia for a lost voice is the origin of Flowers for Suzanne Clair.

Science fiction often becomes science reality. Scientists need creatives to help them identify the most audacious problems to apply their minds to. Let's imagine all the science fiction published, particularly in the 20th century, the vast majority of which came from the minds of white men: so many classics that formed the world we are living in and the one we are working toward. Now let's imagine all of the books that were written or pitched by minority authors and never published. What ideas were in those books? What sort of worlds? What sort of characters? What sort of world would we be living in now if those ideas had reached audiences half a century ago when the disaster that is unfolding now was still a distant possibility? What if Suzanne Clair wrote science fiction?
Flowers for Suzanne Clair seeks to create this absent imaginary. The process at its heart pivots on 3D scanning plant specimens and then modifying them via a multi-pass exchange between physical and digital. The flower modules in the Compost series are made by provoking voluntary errors, collaborating with the photogrammetric reconstruction algorithm and confusing its expectations. The textures are then painted and projected back onto the 3D mesh in a modeling software, which creates a strange type of organic digitality when fused with the fragments of three dimensional noise scattered around the contours of the flowers. Modular assets are adapted from the raw scans that are then optimized for the different container formats.These same specimens appear in Compost and in the VR world of Of Hybrids and Strings but they have been carefully retopologized via meticulous, meditatively repetitive processes. Each flower is both an offering of grief for Suzanne's missing story, but also an accolade for the power of her imagination, which, in its absence, is infinite.