ART GALLERY OF REGINA

Piece together a personalized narrative experience in digital artist Lisa Birke’s immersive video installation Natures of Reality.

 

Do you feel frustrated by Instagram feeds filled with face-tuned selfies and meaningless platitudes in fancy script? Do you worry about deep fakes or skewed notions of reality induced by blockbuster films rife with CGI (computer-generated imagery)? Have you considered that digital media can enable us to memorialize small but profound moments, such as ladybugs gathered on a twig, or express existential truths?

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Birke’s immersive video installation invites viewers to consider media from all of these perspectives.

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A series of videos shot by the artists over several years are projected on the floor, acting as a meditative reflecting pool. These videos invite visitors to experience small and extraordinary moments: falling snow, feet in melting ice, ladybugs on a branch in the wind, a dead deer.

 

Another video series by Birke is jarring in its slick artifice. A blond spokesmodel marches across a succession of natural backdrops, out-of-place in her inexhaustible wardrobe of slinky gowns à la Vanna White. The model holds aloft a series of digitally composited 3D signs, advertising these meaningless platitudes to a barren landscape. Empty, prescriptive, and tongue-in-cheek, phrases such as "live large," "go with the flow," and "survival of the fittest" create uncomfortable juxtapositions, bringing up questions of entitlement and how meaning is created or demanded of our lives by society and mass culture, for whom, and at what cost? Other statements, such as "Viewpoint" and "Glass Half Empty/Full," hint at the possibility for different perspectives to emerge.

 

In contrast to these laughably hollow, larger than life "affirmations," community members share genuine stories of finding meaning in their lives in sixteen videos created in process with the artist. Birke worked with community members to create paper avatars that she animated using motion capture technology to speak their words. These stories, presented on monitors and cell phone-triggered augmented reality dispersed throughout the gallery, encompass diverse voices and perspectives. Gallery visitors are encouraged to walk between monitors and AR as the voices start and stop speaking, piecing together a personal narrative experience.

 

Many community members' narratives reveal that meaning emerges not from airbrushed perfection but from acceptance and celebration of difference, tolerance, finding one's own truth, and the power of community. Through the consumerist din of prescriptive norms and aspirational desires that saturate our media, Birke's Natures of Reality invites us to hear the truth about the meaning of life: beauty, magic, and wealth of meaning lie in complexity and nuance.