‘WE ARE MULTI_STOREY CREATURES  -  Trailer

 

 

We are Multi-Storey Creatures’ sees the artist attempt to enter the online world and join her digital counterpart. Power shifts between the characters as a relationship between the gamer, their online presence and the SIMS avatar, Alice, fluctuates between indifference, frustration, and fleeting moments of connection. Building an ever-expanding house for the character, the artist becomes a sort of analogue Virgil to Alice’s digital Dante, leading the character from depression and disengagement to re-enchantment and transcendence as she ultimately ascends through the lived space. Dabbling in cloud symbolism from mediaeval mysticism to digital skeuomorphism, this is orchestrated through the introduction of a cloud chamber, a home-made particle physics experiment capable of revealing the immaterial and subatomic activity within the house. 

 

In her 1929 book, ‘The House of the Soul’ theologian and mystic Evelyn Underhill wrote, ‘We are two story [sic] creatures’, reinforcing the dualist nature of the embodied spirit. As the fragmented self continues to extend across ever more multiplicitous platforms this work questions if the term multi-storey creatures may prove more appropriate, or is the divide between the material, the digital and the immaterial still a gulf we have yet to overcome.