Enter a Timeless Meta Jungle with 'Auraform'

New media artist V5MT merges organic shapes with alien artifacts for the sixth room of the Panther Modern digital gallery.

by Benoit Palop

December 12, 2014, 6:45pm

A view inside Auraform, the newly-opened virtual installation room by V5MT. Images courtesy the artist and Panther Modern

Auraform, a stunning series of digitally-rendered images, opens its doors today at [LaTurbo Avedon's](http:// http://turboavedon.com/) virtual gallery, Panther Modern. Created by multimedia artist V5MT, a.k.a. Malgosia Woźnica, the digital installation space—the gallery's sixth—hosts a mystical visual landscape of both archaic and futuristic CGI elements. In Auraform, Woźnica abandons the robotic and mechanical sci-fi aspects of her previous 3D animation project S V R F Λ V X, offering up instead the possibility to explore a meticulous arrangement of digitized sculptures and organic forms with various shapes and scales, neolithic relics, alien and tribal symbols, coral reefs, plants, and mysterious creatures.

While the artist usually prefers to limit the information she provides in order to let her images speak for themselves, The Creators Project spoke to V5MT about the next-generation fairytales woven into the digital world of Auraform:

The Creators Project: Hi Malgosia. Can you tell us about the ideas presented in this strange world and tell us what the viewer is supposed to discover inside Auraform?

V5MT: The idea was to transform the gallery space into a magical fairyland. I obviously had some pop culture cliches in my mind, but more obvious references could be made to the planet where Yoda dies, or certainly some swampy landscape, wet, misty and full of unexpected magic. I filled in the space with many objects, mostly organic. You can see: totemic sculptures, fantastic plants, ethno / tribal / ritual masks and amulets, with mystic symbols (like the many stickers on the gallery’s windows), xenoarcheology objects and rocks, on various scales some large, some tiny, so you need to take a closer look. You can see some creatures there—cartoon style, simple models.

I thought it would be fun to throw some cute characters, to make the scene more fairytale like. I made a little pool, and filled it with the dark liquid, so the landscape was swampy, adding some green, unfortunately looking more toxic with haze, so it was a bit gloomy. I added many light flares to the scene, some fireflies to bring the magic to life, the aura of the place. I also added some ‘alien writing’ patterns here and there, for more mystery.

Most of the objects on display are new, some have been featured in my previous works, like NUETNOGNX a.k.a. Humanity. Most of the talisman-like ones are part of my New Cult Objects series, and some were featured as visuals for Music For Your Plants’ PAN EP online release in DIS Magazine.

Eventually, the atmosphere of AURAFORM is a combination of the ’new age,’ fantasy, art, illustration and cartoon, I guess. In the end though, it's just another 3D net artwork.

How did you integrate your work into the Panther Modern space and what was the biggest challenge?

Room Six was very inspiring. At first I thought it was very small, so I could only put only a few 'sculptures' there. But I somehow managed to fill it with so many things. My personal projects usually grow too big and too complicated.

I feel I could go on and on with modeling the objects and arranging the scene. The biggest challenge with Panther was having the patience to render all these polygons.

What does a platform like Panther bring to your work and what are its advantages?

I love the concept of Panther Modern gallery—each artist is arranging each room with their unique vision, and since it’s a virtual space there are no limits for imagination. That’s why we go wild filling the gallery with water, extra large organic sculptures, and exo-species. In the end all the rooms combine to form a giant fantastic space. It would be an unforgettable experience to walk through all these rooms in VR maybe. I’m really happy LaTurbo Avedon was kind enough to invite me to this wonderful project, and I feel honored to be co-creating the gallery, along with all the great artists who have already shown their works there, and the future ones who will. I know the line of upcoming artists is long and very exciting!

Artistically, how was 2014 for you and what are your plans for 2015? Any ongoing projects that you could give us some details on?

2014 was pretty great artistically for me, I'm really happy to have been part of a couple of fun and important net art projects this year, like the ongoing Ways Of Something series curated and run by Lorna Mills. I think it's 2014's most powerful and (probably) biggest net art project, because it’s engaging so many new media artists worldwide, each producing a one minute piece of this collaborative movie.

I'm not sure if I'll manage to take part in these net art projects in 2015. I will certainly continue working with some people like Joris Grelet, for example, a French art director who has a fresh and powerful style. There’s this exciting project initiated a few months ago, so we will hopefully happily complete it soon. I’m pretty sure some more audiovisual National Geographic / Plantwave aesthetic projects will be done in collaboration with Music For Your Plants as well.

There are some more post-internet art collaborations on the way, but I don’t want to spoil the surprise.