The room is flooded with pink light. Still images of digital plants are being displayed in the rhythm of the breath of a female person. Then we see a photo of a plant at its original location. The room itself is already somewhat reminiscent of a greenhouse, due to the light color and the type of lamps on the ceiling.
The VR is best experienced sitting on a swivel chair. The virtual experience starts also in digital pink light. Like a sight barrier, we can’t see into the distance of the virtual bogland but we focus on the plants ‘growing’ nearby and their constellation among themselves. The gaze is thus concentrated on the morphology of the plants. Slowly the visitor is moved through the virtual environment and after a minute the light changes to real-looking daylight.
The hostile disregard for the visitor’s virtual body, as well as the absence of further interactivity with this world, distills the visitor’s experience to a disembodied gaze. A presence in absence. Proximity without touch. It is a virtual nature, which we will perhaps have to experience in this manner to gradually bid farewell to the habitat of these plants – in the name of passionate love for them.
Daniel Hengst (*1981 in Leipzig/Germany) is a Berlin-based media artist & his artworks are often developed and presented in the framework of the performance arts. Since 2015, works in virtual reality, video and sound installations, sound performances, artistic research projects, and web projects have been created. The works deal with the society-changing potential of technologies or/and taking non-human subjects into account.
