LONDON.- Florian Meisenberg’s practice brings together painting, sculpture and installation with digital simulations experienced through the screen or virtual reality headsets. His works encourage a process of continuous translation from the material to the virtual, causing shifts in perspective from protagonist to voyeur.

In Pre-Alpha (a preliminary stage of software development that may still be unstable and unresolved), users are able to manipulate a wire-frame model in the virtual environment using just their hands to shape, skin and texture forms before uploading their creations to an ever-growing public archive. For Meisenberg, the virtual space is a means to explore the utopian possibilities of lucid dreaming through which we intuitively respond to things that feel impossible and intangible. Viewers observe this intimate choreography of hands moving through virtual space, not seeing what these subtle gestures and ghostly calligraphy bring into being within the simulation.

When it was first presented at the Zeppelin Museum, Friedrichshafen, Germany, the work was installed with a large-scale bespoke rug that drew upon an image by the radical architectural practice Superstudio. Their pre-digital unifying grid model hints at the interlacing of the physical and the virtual and the capacity to come together to co-create whilst individually inhabiting a simulated world.

Upon wearing the headset, visitors are plunged into an ethereal world where they are floating beneath a pulsating sky, the colour and texture of skin. In front of them is a wire-frame model of a geometric shape. A Leap-Motion attachment tracks the users own hands in the virtual environment allowing them, to stretch, push, deform the structure. By looking at their hands, they can call different images and textures which they can choose to apply to their shape or discard. Once satisfied with their final sculpture, they can point their creation up into the internet where they can view it later, download, print and even 3D print their work.

Florian Meisenberg (b. 1980 in Berlin, Germany) Lives and works in New York.

Meisenberg’s work often combines the digital and the analogue to examine ideas of the artificial within contemporary culture. He has had exhibitions and performances at Kunstpalais Erlangen, Kölnischer Kunstverein, Zeppelin Museum, Friedrichshafen, Schirn Kunsthalle, all in Germany, ICA Philadelphia, Kiasma Helsinki and Henie Onstad Kunstsenter Oslo.