Reality Bytes

The work of Australian artist Georgie Roxby Smith challenges the relationship between analog and digital systems, questions materiality and explores new possibilities of virtual reality software. In her Watermill Center residency in New York, Roxby Smith collaborated with new media and theater artists from New York and New Zealand to develop Reality Bytes, an interdisciplinary creation that incorporates visual arts practice, installation, new media art, video art, theater and performance, bringing them together in one "event."
Roxby Smith's recent creations have explored new possibilities of virtual reality media in contemporary art practice. In Reality Bytes, she extracts and re-injects her Second Life avatar into physical space so that her work exists on a kaleidoscope of planes: "in world," within a body of physical sculptures, as ephemeral projections in space; and as recreated performances by both humans and avatars. The effect is that of a hall of mirrors, in which viewers occupy multiple realities at once. In fact, through Second Life, audiences were able access the virtual installation and performance component of the final work not only in person at Watermill, but from their own homes.