source: theverge

Our selves have always been mutable, but technological progress throws the question of who we “really are” into sharp relief. John Rainey’s “Hyper Activity: Scenes from an Other Reality,” showcased at Designboom, plays into both anxiety and fetishization of our strange, cyborg future. The installation’s figures start as photographs, which are then distorted into eerie virtual models and prototyped with a 3D printer before being cast in porcelain. Referred to as “sculptural hyperbodies and prosthetic others,” some evoke human figures stuck in some endless process of transformation, while others are perfectly formed parts of bodies that seem almost more out of place in the surreal landscape.

A description of the exhibit, which is currently showing at London’s Marsden Woo Gallery, suggests that they comment on “our increasing inability to differentiate between reality and its simulations.” But the sculptures can also be read through a different lens: we’re perfectly capable of discerning between different degrees of reality, and we’re coming to accept synthetic spaces and things as being their own curious distillation of it.
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source: rcaacuk

Having witnessed the gradual collapse of the distinction between reality/fantasy, fact/fiction, privacy/publicity, my sculptures are survivors of a struggle for supremacy between the virtual and the actual. They find their eventual destination within a theatre of artifice, where concrete notions of time and space are destabilised.


In this place, an emphasis on multiplication, exposure and display lead to an edited social consciousness that alters how we configure impressions of both ourselves and others. They are artefacts of a study of the boundaries of representation in a time when synthetic experience and existences prevail, mediated by social media and digital imaging.