Conceived as a smartphone retreat , EDEN is an experience crafted by Christiane Peschek for whom the concept of future archeology has been a long-time research focus. Flirting with the idea of virtual longevity, EDEN transposes the search for a perfect mind-body condition into an audio-visual journey to a conjectured net-based paradise as final destination. Users make decisions that form their individual journey guided by their instincts, desires and a mysterious voice playing angel, reminiscent of workout and meditation apps and digital tools of the wellness industry.
In her research on future archeology, Christiane Peschek has long pondered over how and what future generations will discover about the ways we live today. From surveying past and present archeological methods – in all their triumphs and inaccuracies – she envisages the traces that will be left behind from an era in which a large part of human activities happen on touchscreens and increasingly, touchless gesture interfaces. Social media and the accessibility of face-altering, feature-enhancing filters and digital tools mean a variety of possibilities in representing our physical state, yet the perfect condition of human existence remains so gendered, so singular, so perky.
EDEN was conceived as a smartphone retreat as a satire of the digitisation of the wellness industry and the peculiar fate of our age: locating spirituality in the smartphone. Not only do workout app users go about their daily routines with religious fervour, meditation apps and podcasts have proliferated in an extension of the sacralised human condition to the mental state as well. Can we memorialise an on-screen version of ourselves that also embodies our consciousness?
Flirting with the idea of virtual longevity, EDEN transposes the search for a perfect mind-body condition into an audio-visual journey to a conjectured net-based paradise as final destination. Users make decisions that form their own individual journey guided by a mysterious voice playing angel, uttering words of encouragement and caution in a dreamscape melding heaven and hell at the whims of their desires and intuitions.
The works of Christiane Peschek live between emotional alienation and gender-neutral body image production in an extended virtual space. In multi-sensory installations she creates dialogues sculpted by virtual exhaustion, intimacy and optimisation, between body and screen, between on- and offline representations. These interfaces between post-photography, post-internet, text and painting become hybrids between analog processes and digital/virtual transformation. In interaction with near-body technologies such as smartphones and ipads, she explores the “hyper-ego” using the surface of touchscreens. Her works have been internationally exhibited e.g. at FOTOGALERIE Vienna, U10 Belgrade, UNSEEN Amsterdam, Salzburger Kunstverein, Benaki Museum Athens, MAK Vienna, Photon Gallery Ljubljana and Sanatorium Istanbul. I was awarded with several international prices such as the UNSEEN Tesla Art Trail award, honor price Emergentes DST and lately with the bang.prix price for innovative art pracice. In 2019 I was holding the state scholarship for artistic photography from the Austrian Government. My works are found in collections such as ING DiBa Art Collection and the Kupferstichkabinett Vienna. I am is offline based in Vienna.
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