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Above: Materialised #1: This is Real Virtuality fabric print. Click to view additional images.

This is Real Virtuality was a photographic and text-based networked performance that occurred online as a weblog from 25th of August 2013 to the 25th of August 2014. The performance consisted of a first-person narrative that recounts the experiences of an unnamed protagonist noticing colliding virtu/re-alities, that is the merging of ‘virtual’ and ‘real’ spaces, in their daily life.

Digital photographs were taken in ‘real’ or inhabited spaces of anything that made reference to ‘virtual’, online or digital contexts from the protagonist’s perspective. Texts were then composed as if written by the protagonist to accompany the photographs as posts within a weblog. Combined, the photographs and texts provided examples of a wide variety of ‘real’ forms that have been influenced by ‘virtual’ contexts and are placed back into the ‘virtual’ context of the web. By moving from ‘virtual’ to ‘real’ and back again the work refers to the concept of Deleuzian folds and employs a process referred to as the flip-flop by Robin Sloan. The flip-flop describes folding, or what Sloan calls pushing, a work of art or craft over-and-back between the digital and physical world or the ‘virtual’ and the ‘real’.

Commissioned by NeMe as part of the exhibition Self as Actor: colonising identity the performance weblog as a whole has been folded or flipped once more from the ‘virtual’ space of the web to the ‘real’ space of the gallery as a double-sided print on fabric. As such, the print materialises what was immaterial. The print displays both front and back ends of the weblog, that is it’s visual appearance and underlying code, is true to its original screen size and measures just over six metres or twenty feet in length.