Meet the Artists: Unleashed Utopias

Anan Fries is nominated for the VR art prize 2023 with their work ›[Posthuman Wombs]‹. 

Anan Fries is a digital and performing artist. They spent many years as the artistic director of the game-theater collective machina eX, which is known for its immersive, gamified experiences. In addition, Fries is a co-founder of Henrike Iglesias, an experimental performance collective with a strong love for pop and politics.

They explore correlations between technology and what we regard as ›nature‹ and ›natural‹. Fries is interested in the question of how technologies can make it possible to experience queer perspectives, and in how to conceive of virtual and physical spaces more closely. Fries’s works are made at the intersection between digital and representative arts.

Lauren Moffatt is nominated for the VR art prize 2023 with her work ›Local Binaries‹. 

Lauren Moffatt makes immersive environments using experimental approaches and narrative structures. She investigates the connections between physical and virtual spaces and bodies. Here, she is especially interested in the blurred boundary between digital and organic life. The artist works with a mix of traditional, obsolete, and pioneering technologies. These combinations lead to speculative fictions whose origins can often be found under real circumstances. Lauren Moffatt is interested in creating new worlds that can be populated by outsiders and loners.

Marlene Bart is nominated for the VR art prize 2023 with her work ›Theatrum Radix‹. 

Marlene Bart works at the intersection of natural history, anatomy, and the visual arts. She combines scientific and artistic images to create a new visual language. To what extent does this common visual language make it possible to rethink systems of order in the natural sciences? Here, Bart’s research is also artistic—how can the human relationship to these categories be influenced and even altered by virtual reality, or VR. Using a variety of techniques (prints, artists’ books, sculptures, installations, VR), she shifts historical books and other evidence into a contemporary context.

Mohsen Hazrati is nominated for the VR ART PRIZE 2023 with his work ›Fãl Project [none-AI]‹. 

Works by the artist Mohsen Hazrati deal with the process of linking traditional literature with digital technologies.

After majoring in graphic design, with a minor in new media and digital art, Mohsen Hazrati graduated from the Shiraz Art Institute of Higher Education in 2012. His art has been seen at a variety of conferences—for example, at the University of the Arts Berlin, the Staatliche Akademie der Bildenden Künste (State Academy of Fine Arts) in Stuttgart, the IAM weekend Barcelona, EVA, the Multimedia Anthropology Lab at University College London.

Rebecca Merlic is nominated for the VR ART PRIZE 2023 with her work ›GLITCHBODIES‹. 

In her work, the artist Rebecca Merlic examines alternative forms of society and considers how social and economic conventions can be changed. Using digital technologies such as 3D scans, she creates new ways to depict diverse identities in a virtual society.

Rebecca Merlic is an artist, an architect, an experimental filmmaker, and an academic assistant on the core team of Experimental Game Cultures at the University of Applied Arts in Vienna.