Re-Envisioning Reality - Tech+Art | Genius: Picasso

Almost my entire life has lived virtually on a screen, and what I'm looking for is a way to bring the digital experience put into physical form. I grew up in a place where, like, escapism was necessary. I was drawing and painting and programming and building computers since I was eight. It's the fascination with, like, wanting to create, like, full of oils in a vertical space.

First, I'm sketching and painting and modeling in 3D software and video game engines. What I'm doing is I'm just giving it logic, so it has randomness. I'm just giving it randomness that mimics life. There's this obsession with most artists with the idea of exploding the fourth dimension, where the physical and the impermanent meet. That space, like the in-between, is what I'm trying to do. Almost in every show, I'm trying to find the link between the thing that feels impossible and the thing that's tangible.

I can use parts of sculpture to inform virtual reality and, you know, vice versa. The most beautiful and fragile parts of my human experience are stored in screens. Being interested in that and being in love with that as well, it's a complicated feeling. I mean, I certainly am feeling like I'm losing my physicality—the loss of translation between, like, the body and the mind.

The doodle in the physical and the response to that, I think, was these pieces that were really physical—that really, like, sort of false bodies. I was creating these small sculptures in virtual reality and then printed onto Plexiglas and then formed with my body with a blowtorch, creating, like, an artificial armor of a screen. What we're looking for in technology is to enhance being a human being.

As virtuality gets better, our relationship with reality also becomes richer. The hope is that virtual reality sort of stays bad because we don't want it to become any sort of substitute for reality. But then, as a counter to that, it can also become, like, such an incredible tool for healing and for more truthful experiences and for change— you know, really like for change.