Kate Geck

The Soft Tomb series explores the funeral artefacts of a fictitious digital culture. These imagined sacred spaces are imbued with kaleidoscopic AV and obtuse ritual, inviting audiences to engage with vague digital ceremony.

IMAGES |Kate Geck, Soft Tomb, 2013, installation view | Images courtesy of the artist.

SOFT TOMB #2

The Soft Tomb series of works are from an ongoing body exploring ‘Unmediated Immediacy’. The works attempt to connect audiences to the real experience of a moment in time – as opposed to mediating an experience through social media and smartphones.

What I term ‘Mediated Immediacy’ are our super saturated social media interactions. We can see things on the other side of the world instantly, ‘like’ them and interact with them. We can google anything and access entire histories in a few clicks. Our sense of connection to people and events is framed by this constant and immediate access to content. For me, this is a false sense of connectivity. I float in a tangle of data consumption that is becoming more and more my sole mode of connecting. But it is a curated connection, based on binaries of like and dislike, along with status soundbites. Then again, maybe I just don’t use the internet properly.

By contrast, what I call ‘Unmediated Immediacy’ is the connection to a moment in space and time facilitated by tangible sensory experience. Engaging multiple senses in the formation of an experience seems like a simple thing – but sometimes entire weeks go past where I haven’t savoured and connected with a point in real time. The reflection and diffraction in my work is me trying to create a space with no edges – where I can be absorbed into an experience unbound by time stamps and hash tags.

Adjunct to this investigation of modes of experience, Soft Tomb #2 draws on a loose narrative around the identities our data consumption may create. Our browsing history paints a picture of us in space and time – and globally, the bizarre and non-hierarchical constituents of the internet are forming a snapshot of contemporary culture. Everyone can be an author. Information hierarchies can be hard to locate in such a heavily opined and virally curated data-scape. The objects and spatial considerations of this work are vaguely informed by the idea that maybe one day our internet identity will be misappropriated and incorrectly interpreted. I like to imagine the spaces and artefacts of a future cult that is based on the detritus of the internet – memes, mundane data rituals and glitch.

– Kate Geck, 2013.