ART / $5 SUGGESTED DONATION / ALL AGES / Originally created for Babycastles in New York, Slide to Expose is an augmented reality project by Nicole Ruggiero, Molly Soda, and Refrakt. The project explores digital intimacy, privacy, the concepts of life and death online, and ultimately asks how devices, particularly our phones, aid, form, and reshape our perceptions of these experiences.
We experience a virtual reality through an infinite sequence of call and response behaviors — posting content, gathering likes and comments, receiving praise, or criticism. Everything we do virtually, whether it’s our intent or not, invites interaction. Our memories, our emotions, our reactions are tied to our devices, and the interplay of ego validation and ego death brings forward an interesting juxtaposition, a flurry of thoughts constantly present at the forefront of our conscious that remain hidden as onlookers virtually pass our feeds and physically pass our bodies.
Experienced as a bedroom, a typically private space, the installation presents as a physical still life. As visitors enter the room they’re invited to use their phones as augmented reality triggers, scanning the objects of the space, and exploring the room to find private displays of a digital consciousness that secretly overlays the objects. Scanning a pillow creates a text message, scanning a mug generates an email, each, together, creating a second living layer in a constant state of fragmentation and regeneration. An infinite cycle of new life and immediate death all in one space.
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Nicole Ruggiero is a 3D visual artist who makes work based on the internet and online trends. Nicole exposes the positive influences that technology imbues on culture and subverts them with the existential feelings people face when interacting through the medium. She emphasizes empathy by portraying comprehensive figures using social technology in the pursuit of using her art pieces as a forum of discussion for people around the world.
Molly Soda is an American artist and internet personality. She works across a variety of digital platforms, producing videos, GIFs, zines, and web-based performance art. Her work explores the technological mediation of self-identity, contemporary feminism, culture, and perversion.
Refrakt is a Berlin-based artist collective formed by Alexander Govoni and Carla Streckwall in 2014. They are working on transmedia projects in mixed realities at the intersections of art, science, technology and models of perception. In 2015 they developed the Augmented Reality App Refrakt in collaboration with Michael Schröder and have been working together ever since. In a digital society, where technology increasingly starts to shape our perception and behaviour in everyday life, their work focuses on the nature of the medium itself.