Metafrictions

Metafrictions is a multimedia installation by interdisciplinary artist Laura Splan that combines recent animations and weavings alongside new extended reality (XR) collaborations exploring motion tracking, 3D animation, AI, sound, and VR with performative facilitation.

This mixed reality experience encourages collective co-creation and collaborative interaction while revealing residues of individual agency. An interactive VR experience, facilitated by a performer, functions as a prologue that frames a series of sensory encounters evoking oscillating sensations of memory and immediacy, presence and absence. Metafrictions explores the potential for hybrid experiences to reveal “virtual residues” persisting in the physical world while exploring possibilities for new materially liminal sensations. The artworks both unveil and create “virtual residues” that persist in the “real” world through accretion of implied meaning and function introduced “inside” technologically mediated experiences that cannot be unseen “outside” of them. The project resituates the physical and the virtual as simultaneous rather than separate, where past events resonate as “ambient frictions” in the present. Frequently working with biotechnological themes, Splan positions “residues” in both the abstract (metaphorical, ephemeral, ethereal) and the literal (physical, chemical, biological). References to epigenetic research on environmental influences on gene expression serve as a conceptual scaffold to explore the impact of past events on our present bodies and future humanity. Metafrictions is part of an expansive body of work that also includes animations, sound and weavings. Selected weavings from her Tangible Variations series are incorporated in Splan's preview at ONX as well as animations from the Baroque Bodies series