Matheus Montanari

The work is an online V.R space where everything is texturized with the artist's skin.  Inspired by a dream, the work raises questions about a vigilant and biometric dystopia. Digital systems are increasingly using biometric reading as personal identification. The lines drawn in our hands are responsible for creating a surveilled identity. Organic skin comes into contact with touch-sensitive surfaces, which reduce us to digital data that relate to each other. Are these fragments of relational data that come to define humanity? Can every human and non-human relationship be reduced to this? What are the possible encounters and what is the meaning of touch in this context? These are contradictory questions that include skin as an organ of touch, touch as intimacy, and metrified skin as identity. The work explores these questions through an immersive visual and sonic experience.

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The textures were created by scanning different parts of the artist's skin. These images were grouped together to create collage-like sets of different skin segments, producing a variety of textures that could be applied to different objects.

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The terrain of the environment has a slight movement caused by a generative and procedural process. This movement is based on Perlin's noise algorithm, which creates a monochromatic noise gradient that the terrain follows as a topographical model, creating elevations in the lighter areas and depressions in the darker areas. The movement of the terrain affects all objects in the environment. As it moves, it slightly deformes them, causing the skin texture to suffer slight variations as well. In this way, the environment creates new dermatoglyphic combinations, as if looking for its own fingerprint.

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Work selected for the .Art Gallery in the ARS ELECTRONICA 2021 V.R exhibition "concrete house". 

https://vrallart.com/artworks/when_you_touched_me-you_left_something

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