Strawberry Tree Artist Statement
Strawberry Tree is a multimedia installation that utilizes 3D printed photogrammetric models, mechatronics and video game engines. The project features autobiographical documents alongside fantastical creatures and fictional spaces to explore ontological questions that orbit meaning through the archive, technological intervention and transcendence.
This show focusses on a specific period in my life – the year between my father dying and my son being born. This piece is an extension of a series of works that aim to contemplate on the nature of being, place and memory in the context of new digital technologies. Specifically focussed on grief, this immersive exploration of the self uses a variety of mediums to world build, situating the viewer inside the digitally transferred mindscape of the artists through virtual representation, voiceover, video and sculpture. It asks where selfhood lies within the excavation of memory objects and the advent of technologies that seemingly restructure our own ideas of the human form, evoking ideas of the Gothic.
Mediums: 3D Printing, Video Game Technologies, Mechatronic Assemblages, Video & Sound.
Recent Article: Death at Your Fingertips - The Stranger
This show focusses on a specific period in my life – the year between my father dying and my son being born. This piece is an extension of a series of works that aim to contemplate on the nature of being, place and memory in the context of new digital technologies. Specifically focussed on grief, this immersive exploration of the self uses a variety of mediums to world build, situating the viewer inside the digitally transferred mindscape of the artists through virtual representation, voiceover, video and sculpture. It asks where selfhood lies within the excavation of memory objects and the advent of technologies that seemingly restructure our own ideas of the human form, evoking ideas of the Gothic.
Mediums: 3D Printing, Video Game Technologies, Mechatronic Assemblages, Video & Sound.
Recent Article: Death at Your Fingertips - The Stranger
Artist Bio
Umut Gunduz is a British born Turkish artist whose PhD research at the University of Washington focuses on the relationship between the living and the digital. Within his practice, he uses video game technologies, photogrammetry software, and other digital tools in order to create what he calls speculative anatomies—artificially rendering things dead as a kind of performance. For this, he uses the autobiographical, and specifically, self-portraiture as a means of meditating on his own existence post-mortem. These versions of himself are perforation through which the body, an element of which is digital, is leaked into the environment.
His extensive background in film and sound plays major influence in his work, informing his aesthetic choices both within the industry and as an educational tutor.
Umut is a PhD student at DXARTS who supported this show.
Portfolio: umutgunduz.net
Umut Gunduz is a British born Turkish artist whose PhD research at the University of Washington focuses on the relationship between the living and the digital. Within his practice, he uses video game technologies, photogrammetry software, and other digital tools in order to create what he calls speculative anatomies—artificially rendering things dead as a kind of performance. For this, he uses the autobiographical, and specifically, self-portraiture as a means of meditating on his own existence post-mortem. These versions of himself are perforation through which the body, an element of which is digital, is leaked into the environment.
His extensive background in film and sound plays major influence in his work, informing his aesthetic choices both within the industry and as an educational tutor.
Umut is a PhD student at DXARTS who supported this show.
Portfolio: umutgunduz.net