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Natural and Digital Worlds Collide in the New Museum's Shaft Space

Eva Papamargariti's 'Factitious Imprints' invites you into the twilight zone between the real and the uncanny.
Images courtesy the artist

Uncanny landscapes, both artificial and organic, emerge in the works of London-based Greek new media artist, Eva Papamargariti. By merging computer-generated textures and elements, 2D and 3D, with both phone and camera-captured matters, she deconstructs and rethinks notions of motion, shape, and reality. As part of the New Museum’s ongoing Stowaway Series, Papamargariti unveils the new episode, Factitious Imprints, to investigate the conflicting boundaries between our past, present, and future realities.

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"The Stowaway Series is a constellation of episodic projects and spontaneous interventions in spaces throughout the New Museum," Helga Christoffersen, assistant curator at the New Museum tells The Creators Project. Papamargariti's work thus fits snugly within with the program's efforts to showcase the cream-of-the-crop in terms of emerging artists.

As with many bright, young new media stars, Papamargariti has no problem juggling a wide range of tools to make her work. “Making use of time-based mediums to explore the relationship between digital images and our material reality, Eva has made a site-specific installation in which her video work expands into the staircase space of the New Museum,” Christoffersen explains of Factitious Imprints.

The work continues Papamargariti's exploration into the twilight zone where the synthetic meets nature. To learn more about Factitious Imprints, The Creators Project asked the artist a few questions.

The Creators Project: Hey Eva, can you tell us how you found yourself working with the New Museum?

Eva Papamargariti: I met the curator Helga Christoffersen within the context of the preparations of The Equilibrists exhibition that is going to happen in Athens in June. It will be a collaboration of the New Museum and Deste Foundation, presenting the work of 33 young Greek artists.

Apart from my participation on this exhibition, I was invited to create a site-specific installation at Shaft space in the New Museum. The collaboration was really interesting, especially the conversations I had with the curator, quite eye opening in many ways.

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What were your inspirations while creating Factitious Imprints?

The main idea that revolves around the project is the way we perceive and control nature right now and specifically through the idea of the surface, the terrain of earth that gets manipulated and imposed to intense modification through human attempts.

I assume that your creative process is a bit different for this piece, right?

The tools I used are similar with what I usually use, but apart from softwares like 3ds max or After Effects and Real Flow for example, this time I used recording tools, sound composing software, and I created a lot of the textures from scratch, so I could say it is a more elaborate and multi-sourced effort.

What will the viewer experience while watching Factitious Imprints?  

The viewer will watch an almost 9 min. video piece with sound, in which I am exploring the notion of layering and traces as a mechanism of creation but also an indication of destruction. The video is a combination of images, animated material, and footage from handheld recording devices.

The viewer can dive into this continuously altering artificial landscape, watching images ranging from close ups to my own skin to distant edited footage from my cellphone camera and sound field recordings. Parts of those images have been rebuilt and printed on synthetic fabrics, each one of which has characteristics that 'resist' the idea of nature.

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Can you tell about the convergence between Factitious Imprints and your practice at large? 

I usually consider each project as a separate piece of work which is always linked through to the wider context of my practice. This project is site-specific, which is something I haven't done much in the past, so in a way it is different; also it contains both physical and digital objects.

Despite that, I consider both the fabric prints and the video to be actually one piece. Even though the methods of production are different, the actual objects are connected like fragments of a single artifact.

To take a closer look at Factitious Imprints, check it out at the New Museum between the third and fourth floors until June 19, 2016. See more of Eva Papamargariti's work on her website.

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