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There is more than one of you here: your physical body and the digital body that is created when you enter the space. 

This digital you isn’t quite right, but it tries to be. It mimics your every movement, but it might be a strange size or shape. It might not even look human. 

If this digital you is made by your body, does that make it part of you? What is it otherwise?

 

In Plato’s Allegory of the Cave, cave dwellers see shadows as pure form and as constituting their whole reality due to never seeing the outside of their cave and subsequently not understanding the true nature of shadows and light. The Allegory of the Cave asks us to consider the way in which we observe what is visible in our reality and to question how our own perspectives, experiences and situations influence the scope in which we formulate our own truths and reality.

In Shadows of Light, mediated digital shadow forms mimic movement and follow viewers through the gallery, shifting and changing as they make their way through the space. The projected forms are an inversion of shadows, instead of the viewer casting shadows, they cast light into a virtual space. The digital avatars that constitute these light forms do not mirror the viewer’s form, instead they consist of a range of differing models that vary in scale, shape, perceived gender, identity and “humanness”. Shadows of Light asks the viewer to question the truth of forms that exist within digitally mediated spaces, the simultaneously visible and invisible extensions and representations of themselves within these spaces and how their own subjectivities may be formed within virtual space. 

By engaging viewers with the concept of being in virtual space, the nature of identity within these spaces and the forms, projections, phantoms and falsehoods that proliferate within embodied media, Shadows of Light intends to instigate consideration and questioning of the invisible, yet observable nature of embodied digital presence. 

— Alex DeGaris

 

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