GLITCHBODIES (360 video version)

GLITCHBODIES is an interactive computer game as well as an immersive experience in virtual reality (VR). Here, Merlic draws on the structures of video games, a widespread form of digital entertainment. The artist does research into new forms of feminism, LGBTQ+, and drag society. Using 3D scans, she makes digital avatars for real people, which are then embedded into virtual landscapes. She creates intimate and sensitive images of different individuals, and taken together, they give rise to a diverse society in virtual space. Individual identities become a collective body, a network, which turns the avatars into politically charged bodies that are free of conventions and compulsions (binarity, hierarchies, gender). They are contrasts to the heteronormative and binary avatars that are usually encountered in classic video games. Instead, GLITCHBODIES takes us on a free-flow journey through individual and diverse realities of people who share the notion of “queer” as a political attitude. Presented as a part of UNLEASHED UTOPIAS, exhibition of the VR ART PRIZE in cooperation with CAA Berlin (September 9 – November 5, 2023 at Haus am Lützowplatz, Berlin). More information: vrkunst.dkb.de

(c) the artist