With the dawn of Virtual Reality technology, we are able to have first-person experiences that allow further understanding of our senses in relation to our physical reality.
Virtualshamanism: Towards an alternative digital reality of consciousness, is an interactive virtual reality installation based on modern concepts such as technoshamanism, ancestral-future and neo-paganism, among others.
A virtual-shamanic work operates between two worlds, the modern one, digital, futuristic and scientific, and the ancestral one, traditional, intuitive and shamanic, generating an approach and mediating between both sides through its role as a nexus and peacemaker, where the physical, the virtual, and the augmented spaces converge.
What if the traditional -often related with the tech industry- VR market could be transformed into an experiential VR-art piece in such a way that an audience can experience, walk, interact, or even meditate and achieve spirituals states of mind inside the virtual realm of the artwork?
A virtualshaman works with audiovisual representations which are transformed into maps that will serve as a guide to decipher and manifest the techno-spiritual and cyber-pagan problems of this era.
According to Terence McKenna, computers represent an extension of the human capabilities, prostheses working as devices to extend the mind and the perceptual functions of the human being, calculating and simulating complicated processes in order to achieve new answers and knowledge.
In a Virtualshamanic work, the confrontation between imagination and hallucination is diluted by the use of VR technology as a tool for the research of an alternative digital reality of consciousness.
Matias Brunacci is an Argentinian new media and interdisciplinary artist, born in Buenos Aires and based in Berlin. He received a Master degree in New Media Art at the Buenos Aires University of Arts -UNA- in Argentina, finishing his studies under the Student Exchange Program for Generative and Computational Art at the Berlin University of Arts -UdK- in Germany.
Implementing a wide range of media into his practice, Brunacci works in the intersection between art, science, and technology, which integrates virtual, and mixed reality. He enjoys exploring and using these state-of-the-art technologies, amplifying and mixing their effects to create new artistic experiences and digital phenomena. His work takes on multiple forms, ranging from audiovisual performances to multimedia installations.
Technology provides him with an endless palette of new possibilities and enables him to dissolve traditional boundaries across mediums, process, style, and genre. This process integrates deliberate design and random happenstance, realism and abstraction, nature and technology, art and mathematics, science and mysticism, philosophy and humour, etc.
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