Curated by Stephen Danzig of IDA projects, ‘Transverse’ asks questions about how digital media intersects, creates and transforms cultural identities. What part does digital culture play in breaking down social and artistic barriers? The landscape of digital media engages with our imagination, memory and human experience to interact and transform our sense of belonging and identity. A persistent motif throughout Transverse was the notion of place, particularly as it concerns displacement, disorientation and the distortion of the visual field. The manipulation of visual reality is seldom striking, nowadays it is both fully expected and anticipated. Its success in transforming our derived notions of cultural identity and place is determined by how far it stretches our psychological framework into new realms and experiences.
Transverse opened with a live performance by ‘Pink Twins’, two brothers, Juha and Vesa Vehviläinen from Helsinki, Finland. The duo boast of once performing in a Mongolian disco with a hardcore metal band. Their VJ performance tightly interwove threads of audio and visual stimuli, like a booming particle accelerator crunching atoms into pixels. Splitter began with a multi-coloured satellite image which became manipulated with streaming watery effects. Pulse + originated from a satellite photo of a Siberian glacier, which gets transformed into the throbbing, convulsion of an extra-territorial onslaught. Defenestrator demonstrated the duos skill for morphing architecturally designed interiors into a hypnotic, space shattering experience.
Stepping into Stephen Danzig and David Sudmalis’s Un_Place one was surrounded on all four sides by projections of an empty blue sky. The throbbing tension built until we momentarily glimpsed a figure falling, inexplicably out of the sky. The experience recalled common notions of nightmares about falling. On witnessing the figure dropping out