“The Unreal” by Gloria López Cleries
Title:
- The Unreal
Artist(s) and People Involved:
Filmmaker, Video Artist, or Animator(s):
Symposium:
Venue(s):
Artist Statement:
The Unreal is a machinima film (videogame recorded in real-time) set in a utopian landscape. The viewer is led in a first-person point of view across the shiny surface of this unexploited mine. Ambient music, accompanied by a soft voice-over, creates a soothing atmosphere and entices the viewer to meditate while also being exposed to the mineral origins of technology and its dynamics of extractivism.
The project, as a non-located, atemporal, ahistorical landscape, addresses the emerging questions of the contradictions of media materiality and its disengagement with the landscape. In a grounded practice-based approach, The Unreal presents an artificial world constructed by video game software, built to play with the appropriation of the visual and narrative codes of techno-colonialism.
The Unreal is a virtual promised land surrounded by an infinite coastline and a transcendental pink sunset. We can draw lines to settler colonialism in what looks like an expedition into the sublime. In this sense, The Unreal has been created as a hyperbolic representation of the techno-romantic discourses that permeate everything related to technological development and solutionism.
The dematerialization and deterritorialization of the digital have been defined by natural metaphors (the cloud, space and the sea) and are part of the rhetoric of digital emancipation and the cultural hegemony of Silicon Valley. Under the illusory slogans of freedom, innovation, progress and infinity, we have willfully forgotten and rejected the physical, material and residual condition of technology.
