Nadezhda Bei
Corpoirreality
About the Item
Use the WASD keys to move
Virtual reality technology questions the usual ways of interpreting the biological and social body. Cyberspace, involving an increasing number of people, supposes a multi-level existence in digital, urban and natural environments. The name of the project "corpoirreality" is an oxymoron formed at the junction of two English words: "corporeality", which contains two Latin roots "corpus" — body and "realis" — material, as well as "irreal" translated as "surreal" and "unreal". Together, they literally denote "bodily irreality".
In the project, bodies are considered as agents that simultaneously form, consume and actualize space by moving in it. On the one hand, technologies help the bodies to play these roles, but on the other hand, they expose the limitations of the bodily reality, shackled by virtual or physical boundaries.
The VR project consists of several spaces created using 3D scanning technology that captures physical artifacts inside the virtual world. Supplemented with virtual objects — three-dimensional representations of movement, excerpts from texts and videos — scanned places acquire new semantic dimensions. Collected together, they open space for a journey through the philosophical concepts of the immaterial/unreal body, the layers of physical and virtual reality, and also represent the speculative search for freedom beyond the technological frameworks and concrete walls.
About the Artist
Nadezhda Bei is a new media artist, who uses VR as her major medium, combining it with performances, process art and painting. As an artist, Nadezhda develops a unique style, thrives on making innovative technological art, and experiments with art&science and question the philosophy behind technologies she uses. Nadezhda works a lot on understanding physical and digital realities, corporeality, and such problems as value of a digital life, simultaneous coexistence of a body in several realities. Nadezhda got her bachelor degree in Computer Graphics and Design in ITMO University (Saint-Petersburg, Russia) in 2019 and took part in academic exchange program in Zlin University of Tomas Bata, Czech Republic. In 2022, she graduated from "Art&Science" Master program at ITMO University. She took part in multiple exhibitions of technological art in Russia and abroad: “V Art Reality” (Saint Petersburg State University, 2020), "Staying with the Trouble" (AIR gallery, Saint-Petersburg, 2021), Speculum Artium Festival (Slovenia, 2021), "Pending Futures" (Art Catch Exhibition Room, 2021), and others. Currently, she works as a VR artist and educator, being focused on studying digital art and XR technologies, also searching for various ways of presenting virtual artworks.
