Rhonda holberton

ARTIST STATEMENT

My interdisciplinary art practice illuminates the politics of the corporeal body navigating through virtual space. Recent projects utilize networked VR designed to trigger subtle interactions of electrons between biological and digital systems through reiki, a speculative cosmetic company whose mission is focused on the potential of products to create distributed performative action ritualizing the Anthropocene, and collaborative image making with Neural Networks. My work hijacks existing technologies to reveal invisible histories and make space in the ordinary for the creation of alternative narratives. The installations, videos, and sculpture I create are often results of experiments using scientific methodologies that return metaphysical hypotheses rather than empirical data. These methods have included everything from stardust harvesting to digging holes on the remediated landscapes of decommissioned military bases.

We are living through a crisis of reality. The collective reality-making produced by digital platforms supports parallel but rarely overlapping realities. At the same time, the material environment and physical bodies living within it are approaching a critical moment of climate-induced destabilization that can only be mitigated by collective action. The solutions to existential problems like these must come from existential analytical frameworks. I use materials and platforms that physically connect human bodies through technology, highlighting they ways signals of digitally engineered worlds have physical ramifications; how the extraction of materials from the environment that support technology are destabilizing the plant; and how we might write better rules for digital platforms that consider the external effects on all bodies and respect the most vulnerable ones.