Artist Spotlight: Exploring Digital Identities with Martina Menegon
one last click and i'll be gone (07/01/2023, 17h05m) by Martina Menegon
Martina Menegon (she/her, Italy, 1988) is an artist, curator and educator. In her artistic practice, Martina works predominantly with Interactive and Extended Reality Art to create intimate and complex assemblages of physical and virtual elements that explore the contemporary self and its “phygital” corporeality. She experiments with the uncanny and the grotesque, the self and the body and the dialogue between physical and virtual realities, to create disorienting experiences that become perceivable despite their virtual nature.
Martina’s work has been exhibited internationally online and AFK in festival, galleries and institutions such as MAK Museum of Applied Arts Vienna, NRW-Forum Düsseldorf, Roehrs & Boetsch Gallery, Les Rencontres d’Arles, Kunstraum Niederoesterreich, FILE Festival, WRO Biennale, Virginia Bianchi Gallery, HeK - House of Electronic Arts. Some of Martina’s work are permanently on view in platforms like Paper-Thin Gallery, Feral File and harddiskmuseum.
Since 2019, Martina has curated many physical and virtual exhibitions. As of 2020, she is Vice Director and Curator at the CIVA Festival for New Media Art of the city of Vienna as well as Head of Extended Reality and Curator at the platform for immersive experiences “Area for Virtual Art“ on behalf of sound:frame.
Additionally to her artistic and curatorial practice, Martina has given lectures, talks and workshops in various at various festival and institutions, and has been teaching at different universities since 2011. She is currently Senior Artist and Lecturer at Transmedia Art, where she teaches “Digital Design and Virtuality”. Martina Menegon currently lives and works in Vienna and is represented by ALBA Gallery in Vienna and ARTEMIS Gallery in Lisbon.
Martina is one of ten digital artists participating in the group exhibit Postgender that is currently on view until 12 February 2023.
Her work can also be viewed and collected through Objkt.com here.
Your works exhibit deep explorations of the digital identity, as being a separate but connected entity to the physical self. How does this journey of exploration of ‘phygital’ corporeality deepen your understanding of the contemporary self as more individuals curiously start to participate in the digital space?
For me, it has made it possible to accept my physicality through my virtuality. Through this "journey of exploration" as you called it, I have come to understand how I can extend through my avatars, and how fluid a self-body can actually become when one embraces the virtual and its multitudes.
And it is a journey that never stops! Constant experimenting, questioning, unlearning, resetting, and balancing is necessary, as is a continuous and open dialogue between ourselves across realities.
In many of your works, eg. ‘Virtual Narcissism’, ‘untouched’, you include distorted 3D scans of yourself, liberating the digital identity from the physical identity that is represented by a perfect selfie, perhaps suggesting that the expression of the digital self has no boundaries. Do you see this as subverting beauty standards prevalent today? If so, what is your prediction as to how perception of beauty could be impacted by increased participation in digital space through avatars?
In many ways, the digital has already influenced the idea of beauty, and it will continue to do so. It seems to me that beauty is becoming more subjective and fluid, and I believe that the virtual can inspire us with its multitude of possibilities. On the other hand, too many virtual spaces still offer binary humanoid bodies, restricting the freedom of the self even online... It's such a pity!
As for me, my glitched avatars certainly have been a way to subvert beauty standards that were imposed on me (or that I imposed on myself) at a young age. I did artistic swimming until the age of 16 while attending a catholic school - my parents both worked full time and this was the only school offering afternoon classes at the time. Therefore I feel my self-body was very much constrained, modeled, limited, and standardized throughout my childhood. I was never thin enough, elastic enough, straight enough. And in order to hide or reduce myself to what was expected, I felt I had to control my body, while at the same time feeling completely out of control.
So for me the virtual, the avatars and especially the glitch selves I create have made me feel finally free, finally myself! And I am obsessed!
We are interested in the idea of surrendering the digital self to react to participation by others in works such as ‘a point of no return’, and ‘one last click and I’ll be gone’. You also mentioned experiencing caring for the digital self. What do you wish for participants to takeaway from interactions with your work?
With my work, I'm exploring the idea of avatars as tangible and perceivable entities, digital selves that we embody when in cyberspace.
The idea is particularly emphasized in my interactive works, where participants may interact with my avatars, but do not have to do so. Essentially, I always provide a range of levels of interaction, from passive to more extreme actions and reactions that have an effect on my virtual selves.
My wish is always to make participants aware of the reality of the virtual and to reflect on their relations and behaviors with avatars.
Tell us about your artistic process, and what sparked your interest in working with Augmented Reality? What are some of the tools you are most excited to work with that best express your visual storytelling?
Basically, I love to experiment with anything that sparks my curiosity! And it's so much fun to find ways to "misuse" them and incorporate them into my work!
As for Augmented Reality, for me it is a way to give my avatars a home, a reality to exist in, and a space to inhabit. With AR, I can experience places I cannot physically reach, but I can experience them through my digital selves. And I am able to free myself and my avatars from the boundaries imposed by physical and virtual realities. There is something so poetic about it.
Would you share with us your view on how the perception of time in relation to the self would be impacted by more people assuming digital identities?
Wow! I love the question! Until now, I had never really thought about time in relation to myself and my avatars.
I feel that time slows down when I embody some of my virtual selves. I find it very calming and it can become quite emotional for me. And because it is so comforting, I often don't feel time passing at all, which has always made finding a good balance between my physical and virtual selves difficult for me.
So I suppose it's about balance a lot, and learning how to exist in our physical and virtual identities, dividing our time between these realities without disregarding either.
Any exciting projects you are currently working on that we should be on the lookout for?
At the moment, I am focusing on the final edition of the CIVA Festival of new media art that opens next week on February 17th in Vienna. Together with Eva Fischer, I curated the festival exhibition under the title "Intangible Care" that includes works by Angela Washko, Josèfa Ntjam, Kumbirai Makumbe, Morehshin Allahyari, Stefanie Moshammer, Tina Kult, Susanne Kennedy & Markus Selg. As you can imagine, I am very excited about it!
In addition, I am planning a few exhibitions and can't wait to share more details once they are finalized!
I also long for some "free-from-deadlines" time to experiment freely and create some new artworks.