exonemo
Realm
About the Item
"Realm" is a net-based artwork that can be accessed via two platforms: smartphones and computer web browsers. When users access the same URL through these different channels, they encounter different images and experiences, accompanied respectively by the words “You can’t see there from your mobile” and “You can’t touch there from your desktop,” which emerge at the bottom of each version’s screen. The images of invisible natural landscapes and beautiful graves hint at an environment where two totally contrasting elements coexist. exonemo experienced the lockdown in New York City imposed amid the spread of COVID-19, a period when people were unable to see anyone outside their families. It was their daily visits to a nearby cemetery during the lockdown that inspired the idea for Realm, which they went on to shape into a poetic expression only achievable through the medium of net art.
About the Artist
The Japanese artist unit "exonemo" (by SEMBO Kensuke and AKAIWA Yae) was formed in 1996 on the Internet. Their experimental projects are typically humorous and innovative explorations of the paradoxes of digital and analog computer networked and actual environments in our lives. Their The Road Movie won the Golden Nica for Net Vision category at Prix Ars Electronica 2006. They have been organizing the IDPW gatherings and "Internet Yami-Ichi" since 2012. They live and work in New York since 2015.
