Instructions:
In order to view the Virtual Kodra, you need a VRML plug-in for your web browser. If you don't have a plug-in, you can download one from a number of Internet sites, including:
BS Contact VRML/X3d (win)
BS Contact VRML/X3d (mac)
The size of the Virtual Kodra file is 14Mb. In case of a slow connection, there is a strong possibility to experience a small delay in the data loading.
Virtual Kodra is an exhibition that belongs to the context of the events of the Action Field Kodra 2011. This exhibition, though, is not presented at the old Military Camp of Kodra at Kalamaria, nor in Thessaloniki, nor in Greece or in another country, but somewhere that we cannot determine geographically. The space in which Virtual Kodra will be presented is located within the natural environment in which we live, but we cannot realize with our eyes or with another of our senses. It is located in another dimension, which nevertheless is an extension of our own natural world. It is an exhibition that will be set up and presented in the cyber space. Its entrance is located on the upper right corner of the website www.actionfieldkodra.gr, of the Action Field Kodra 2011. It is being curated by two visual artists, whose work and research focuses in the field of technology of art. They attempt to examine the cyber-space as a real space, in which we find the three dimensions of space and the dimension of time, in parallel with the natural forces. Until now, the Cyber-space is being presented and dealt with as a space/dimension of a virtual reality, with the notion of «virtual» being interpreted as potential, factitious, or spurious. Cyber-space exists as long as man is a p/c user; its existence seizes when the p/c’s shut down. Space in Virtual Kodra is being approached through the human Being, as Heidegger conceives it, and not as virtual in the sense of potential. It does not accept the notion of virtual reality according to Plato, as a replica of the real, original space/world, delusional. In this project, cyber-space is conceived as original, real space, but simply with different data in relation to the notion and the conception of time, or space, and of gravity. It is a microcosm (just like the one of atom in physics), which beyond the dimensions of space and time, it is being surrounded by powers of electromagnetism, weak and powerful nuclear power, and gravity, which does not exist or it just has null indicators. The homelessness of man that dominates his human Being, has already peddled to this environment in a way that is familiar to him, directly identical with his future plans to inhabit/conquer other planets; plans that are based on logic, in which he is called to manipulate the possible natural phenomena there, including gravity. This intervention through the process of digital depiction is the only intervention accepted by Virtual Kodra to be made-up, but this fictitiousness is attached to man but not to the cyber-space. This space is accessible to man in an experiential manner, but only with the use of special technological devices (p/c, phones, satellites, etc.), like the ones he has created in order to examine and travel in space, in the depth of the ocean, to the moon, in the air, etc. It consists of the three dimensions of space and the one dimension of time. The notion of Virtual in Virtual kodra is dealt as an optical information that addresses only the one sense of man, i.e. vision, just like sound addresses to hearing, etc. The notion of digital environment/cyber-space and the way of reading the stimuli that it produces in relation to human senses are being examined. Notions such as geographical position, distance, time, memory, history, home country, culture, etc. that are being redefined by definition in this dimension, mirrored on the notion of Telepresence as a Teletransfer with restrictions. Virtual Kodra will attempt to defend the elevation of the notion of locus/topos above the notion of space, due to its ontological relationship with the actions of the abiding man – in this particular case, the viewer. As such a locus destined to accept the artwork, it is detached from the usual representation of the things and facts of our natural environment/world, seeking what Eduardo Kac mentions to the «Dialogic Telepresence Art and Net Ecology», as the possibility of Telepresence in Art; a possibility that offers more dialogical alternatives to the existing soliloquized system of art, by transforming the telecommunicational links/hubs into a natural bridge that connects the natural and the cyber space (cyber-space as remote spaces). This project will develop a digital environment, which as an artwork mostly identified with Architecture, will defend the reality of cyber-space as a space and as an artwork (sculpture, according to Heidegger) within-its-work, freeing the places or the one place, which in the Heideggerian philosophy is elevated and it is more important than the notion of space; through this logic, the project seeks to argue in favor of the entity of cyber-space as a universe, space, locus, area, in the dimensions of which art can open up new horizons for its further exploration and (why not?) to the abolition of the limits between Cyber and Natural locus. It is about a space that was consciously created in cyber-space in a three-dimensional digital form, a replica of one of the existing natural spaces of the building of the Chambers at the old Military Camp Kodra, in Kalamaria, as a conceptional link of our own natural space with the cyber-space.
Bibliorgaphy
• Plato, Republic, Penguin Classics, 2007.
• Martin Heidegger, «Art and Space» in Men-and-World, 6, 1973, pp 3-8.
• Eduardo Kac, Telepresence & Bio Art «Networking Humans, Rabbits & Robots», 10. Dialogic Telepresence Art and Net Ecology, University of Michigan Press, 2005.
