VARVARA UHLIK
*UPCOMING*
SUNSHINE, HOW ARE YOU?
SLAV GAZE
DIGITAL (AFTER)
PLAYLAND
VIDEO WORKS
COMMISSIONS AND NOT
VARVARA UHLIK
*UPCOMING*
SUNSHINE, HOW ARE YOU?
SLAV GAZE
DIGITAL (AFTER)
PLAYLAND
VIDEO WORKS
COMMISSIONS AND NOT
A solid block of metal is pressed on a pixel-like patch of soil. A recording of a Google Street View walk through the city of Mariupol in Ukraine is projected onto the block. In the video, the city is frozen still and life is on pause, while me digitally moving through it and the image pixels loading being the only motion present. On the metal itself, you can start discovering a texture, which is an etching of an updated satellite view image of a steel factory in the city, which has been bombed down by Russia in 2022. This satellite view hasn't been updated for over a year, showing us only the previous state of it that didn't represent the reality anymore. Today, what we see through the Google Street view is a representation of the past memory, none of these city views look the same anymore - as most of the places, and, possibly, even the people that you see along the walk - are now gone.
The juxtaposition of the updated satellite view and the video of what's the city once was reflects on today's digital presence. On what the internet today represents and how it archives our reality. The world is moving at a fast pace, and as the horrors of reality are catching up with us - the digital preservation is keeping us in the still uninterrupted past.
DOCUMENTATION VIDEO