Overview
Unlimited Creations
6/5 – 8/7
“Creation myths explain in metaphorical terms our sense of who we are in the context of the world, and in so doing they reveal our real priorities, as well as our real prejudices. Our images of creation say a great deal about who we are.”
(David A. Leeming, Creation Myths of the World)
Around 40,000 years ago the first known artwork was created. It shows the stencil-like outline of a hand: They were humans, making their mark. Discovered in a limestone cave on the island of Sulawesi, Indonesia in the 1950s the paintings are a proof of life and one of the first known imagesone could refer to as an “avatar”, a term originating from Sanskrit, meaning “descent”, in this case “the descent of a deity into a terrestrial form”.
“Unlimited Creations” defines the artist in the digital age as a creator of multiple and complex realities, reshaping the meaning of images, concepts, beliefs and politics, of truth and post-truth, reality and hyper-reality, and outgrowing our ancestral bodily capacities. Shifting from what Marcel Duchamp called the “retinal” (pleasing to the eye) to the “intellectual” (in the service of the mind), art has since become a vehicle for sharing distinct views of the world, and more than that, a way of worldmaking.
Essay by Marlies Wirth, Curator Digital Culture, MAK – Museum of Applied Arts, Vienna