Speaking of artist Marina Abramović, you may not be as familiar with her, but you should have heard her story.
For example, let people walk between the naked bodies of her and her boyfriend, Ulay;
▲ "The Immeasurable Thing Imponderabilia", image by Artefiera
For example, sit-ins at the Museum of Modern Art in New York for 716 hours, staring at 1,500 different strangers;
The Artist Is Present, image courtesy of Wiffle Gif
For example, paralyzing her body for 6 hours, allowing passers-by to do whatever they want with 72 tools until someone finally puts a gun in her mouth.
<h1 class="pgc-h-arrow-right" data-track="12" > "Mother of Performance Art" brings new digital experiences</h1>
These artistic acts that challenge the world and push the boundaries have made her once known as the "mother of performance art".
Abramović's creation has always been wild and bold, and every time it is carried out offline, it will cause a sensation from all walks of life, and although the controversy is raging, it will gradually make her famous.
Although Abramović is now 74 years old, she has never stopped creating.
Now, she has begun to shift from offline and try to enter a new platform for artistic creation, the Internet.
Abramović partnered with art platform WeTransfer to launch an online exhibition called Traces.
Because it's presented on the Internet, anyone can come and experience this amazing digital experience.
But unlike Abramović's past offline shows where she used to perform with her body, this time she wants people to experience the transfer of energy on the Internet — from the passage of time, the inner strength of the body, to the elusive chemistry between people and people.
The work is divided into 5 digital "capsule rooms" corresponding to the Martian Stone, Quartz Stone, Starry Night, Jericho Rose, and the suffering of others.
Each room is based on the important moments in Abramović's life, and when you watch and interact with these objects, it's like entering Abramović's brain.
And when these feelings are transmitted to each person, they will connect the same but different emotions and memories of each person.
<h1 class="pgc-h-arrow-right" data-track="19" > [quartz stone].</h1>
In this room, Abramović recounts how he imagined the "memory" of the entire earth through a piece of quartz stone.
Entering the room, the quartz stone has rotated in the darkness, it can move with the slide of your mouse arrow, your mouse is like a flashlight, able to illuminate the interior of the quartz stone, through its "body", refracting a colorful brilliance.
In addition, when you hold down the mouse to move this piece of quartz stone, it will also change direction.
Abramović said that when she hiked along the Great Wall in China for 90 days in 1988 and asked the oldest people in the area about what happened here, she began to pay attention to the different terrain beneath her feet and think about its connection to people's hearts.
She began to understand the earth as a human body: quartz crystals are the eyes of the earth, tourmaline is the liver, hematite/iron is the blood flowing through the earth, copper is the nervous system, amethyst is the mind, and the memories of the entire planet are stored in quartz crystals.
She hopes to convey the feelings of the previous journey in this way, so that people can feel their connection with the earth.
<h1 class="pgc-h-arrow-right" data-track="26" >.[</h1>
In the second room, the same stone, but this stone comes from Mars.
It floated in mid-air and tumbled slowly, and the blurred background was the red planet that humans had explored for many years, with rugged peaks and a deep red calm glow.
When you move the stone, the Martian background also moves, just as you become the stone itself, staying in the vast vacuum, feeling the endless vastness of the universe.
Unlike the calm background music in the previous room, the music here is more empty, distant, grainy, and surrounded. When you stare deeply at the stone and turn, and the audio slides from the right ear to the left ear, the body has a more sense of floating and turning.
Abramović had received a gift, a small Martian stone that inspired her to make this room.
She hopes that people's minds can break through their own limitations and enter a more profound world.
The flight of a bird can affect the winds of Madagascar. With a more holistic understanding of the world, our lives may take on a different look.
<h1 class="pgc-h-arrow-right" data-track="34" > [starry night].</h1>
This room is Abramović's imagination of the starry sky.
As soon as many people see the starry sky, they may think of the flooded Van Gogh Starry Sky Internet Celebrity Exhibition. Abramović also mentions this, saying that she always felt that Van Gogh's works printed in the book were terrible until she saw the real works at the Van Gogh Museum in Amsterdam.
When I look at Van Gogh's paintings, I have a very emotional and physical reaction. Sometimes you don't need to understand why something moves you, your body understands it before you do.
She believes that Van Gogh's creative acumen, like he saw the atomic structure of air, could depict an out-of-body experience. "In reality, the experience is like particles and electric currents moving."
So Abramović turned this experience into an interactive work, people just hold the picture and don't move, and the "Starry Night" on the screen will infinitely enlarge into various subtle particles.
You will feel the nerve endings in your body become "fragments" and then imagine with your senses what is affecting our bodies, making us sometimes energetic, sometimes restless, sometimes calm.
<h1 class="pgc-h-arrow-right" data-track="41" >.jerígo roses</h1>
As soon as you enter this room, you will see a Jericho rose waiting to bloom.
Also known as the "resurrection grass", the Jericho rose is like a "nomadic people" who can grow in extremely harsh deserts and drift for hundreds of years, so it also represents the beautiful meaning of eternal life.
In 1978, Abramović and his lover Ulay also encountered the plant in Death Valley, California.
This Doerigo rose will bloom forever on the screen, but when you tap it, it will grow faster, as if you are controlling this full vitality.
When you move its flower bud to face you, it is like it is blooming wildly in front of you.
When you turn the flower bud upside down, it quickly retracts the flower bud as if everything is returning to the beginning.
The sound of this room is also the most ASMR charm. You can even hear the rustle of flowers, the grunting of flowers, full of vitality.
Abramović hopes that the Jericho Rose will make people think about their own life in relation to nature.
<h1 class="pgc-h-arrow-right" data-track="50" > [the pain of others].</h1>
In the last room, there are photographs of people suffering from various historical events.
She mentions the story of her acquaintance with the writer Susan Sontag, who once wrote a book about the Suffering of Others, which focuses on war photography and explores the relationship between the pain of others and the viewer.
When we look at photographs of "pain" in a brutal war, "as much sympathy as the photograph creates, so does it shrink," Sontag said, "compassion is an unstable emotion that must be translated into action or it will dry up."
As long as we feel compassionate, we feel that we are not complicit in the inflictors of suffering, and our sympathy proclaims our innocence and also declares our incompetence.
This room doesn't have much of an interactive sensory experience, just a heavy picture of our connection to the rest of the world.
Abramović wants people to watch the pain and then think about the pain.
The five "online capsule rooms" of this exhibition were actually exhibited offline at the Old Truman Brewery in London on September 9, but they were only exhibited for a short period of three days, and then began to be exhibited on WeTransfer's online platform.
▲ Image courtesy of The Blair Partnership
After entering the Internet field, by collecting digital content such as video, music, and light processing, Abramović allows more people around the world to learn more about her artistic concepts, as well as more intimate and private work story sharing.
The audience can also carry out an immersive and interactive experience, feeling and thinking from the five dimensions of their own feelings, human light and shade, life nature, the earth under their feet, and the five rooms of the alien universe.
<h1 class="pgc-h-arrow-right" data-track="61" > internet art is becoming more and more and more mobile "new heritage"</h1>
Compared to Abramović's past performance art, this time the internet art seems less radical and bold.
But in fact, Abramović's ability to make digital artistic attempts is already a new exploration that is divorced from the foundation of all previous works.
Because Abramović's past performance art used his own body as the main element of most of his works, and then expressed the power of "immaterial" through the "material" way.
Relation in Time
For performance art, the transition from physical to digital is more difficult.
Most of the existing digital art exhibitions, including photography, paintings, video works, etc., can be directly transformed into digital forms and exhibited online on the Internet.
Of course, there are still some differences between the effect of online exhibition and offline viewing, after all, the digital art revolution has only emerged for more than 40 years.
In 1985, at the Centre Pompidou in Paris, Jean Francois Lyotard curated a groundbreaking exhibition of new media art, "Immaterial", which opened the door to new media art exhibitions, including a large number of interactive installations, sound works, and early morphological experiments in electronic communication.
▲The exhibition site of "Intangible Matter". Image courtesy of Art Agenda
After 36 years, digital technology has been rapidly upgraded, AI, AR, VR, XR and other forms of technology are coming, and technology and art are constantly merging and paralleling.
In 2013, Japanese artist Yayoi Kusama's "I Have a Dream" Asian tour became the enlightenment of the now popular immersive exhibition, and various dazzling scenes and interactive installations also made the Teamlab exhibition a global hit.
▲ Yayoi Kusama's Infinite Mirror House
Later, immersive exhibitions based on the works of Artists such as Monet, Van Gogh, Picasso, and Dali rose and fell, setting off a wave of panoramic and VR viewing.
When a work of art created by AI, "Edmund M. When Bellamy's Portrait sold for $432,000 (about 3 million), digital art was also gaining traction.
Abramović also launched her first MR (mixed reality) performance, Life, in 2019, and although it is not a live-action performance, she said that "augmented reality can also allow people to capture the energy of the performer." But only if the audience forgets that it exists."
Digital art is experimenting with new possibilities both offline and online, while also leaving behind a variety of works of art with historical nodes.
And the digital art that is completely "Internetized" can be said to have really become popular during the covid-19 epidemic.
At the height of the epidemic, almost all offline activities in various countries around the world were cancelled, and most artists were forced to "digitize" their works, all of which became pictures, videos, and virtual reality, and now, NFT works have become the latest wave of art.
▲ NFT "Crossroad"
Of course, at the beginning, these art forms suddenly changed, which caught many artists off guard. Because of technical limitations, the presentation effect is actually not satisfactory, but such a forced change can also be regarded as maintaining the dissemination of the artwork and avoiding the development of faults.
The works of various artists at different stages can be seen and appreciated by people around the world in their homes, and these works have also been preserved in various digital forms.
Abramović is one of them.
Very early on, she had digitally recorded everything she had done in the past, every letter, every piece of paper, every exhibition. She sees this as a way for performance to advance into mainstream art and repeat it again.
During the pandemic, her first digital campaign online was to summarize her practice into the "Abramovich Method" and then sign a one-year partnership with the WePresent Art Platform, sharing these methods with more than 70 million people on the platform.
These methods include drinking water, counting meters, walking slowly, and staring at each other, which are deceptively simple, but can help people to be light, focused, and deeply creative.
Abramović says that when preparing for a performance, he usually needs to prepare for a long time, and also develops different exercises to help him concentrate, improve his willpower, and cross the physical and mental limits.
She hopes to take this "essential" approach to people around the world through the Internet: "Because these exercises can help not only myself, but also any profession in the world."
In Abramović's view, the connection between the performer and the audience is crucial:
Good work creates very strong emotional connections that can actually change people's perceptions and perceptions.
▲ Image courtesy of Artnet News
This new online exhibition "Traces" in Abramović is also like an extension of the "Abramovich Method", which extends to a deeper and broader field of the mind.
She uses the content and spiritual concept of her works to connect and inspire more people through the Internet.
At the same time, this digital age has left a new artistic legacy.
Note: 1. Traces Online Exhibition URL: wepresent.wetransfer.com/story/marina-abramovic-traces2." Abramovich Method URL: abramovicmethod.wetransfer.com