feeling of endlessly scrolling through, zooming in or out really quickly or staring at a screen for too long. My work is often quite visually enticing much like the glowing screens of smartphones and computers. I hoped that the viewers would somehow be seduced by it in a way. Quite a few people stayed starring at it for ages. One person even expressed that they wanted to lie down on it.
W: It is a quite hypnotising piece indeed! But to go back to the connection between virtual and physical, I can see a sort of circle pattern in your process: you start off with a material 3D sculpture
inspired by virtual rocks onto which is projected a Google Earth image of a landscape that is itself a virtual representation of an actual landscape somewhere.
Naomi Ellis: In terms of the way we think about virtual and physical, a part of the theory that the third years were looking at for the exhibition was digital dualism. Maybe five years ago it was popular to think that when you are on your computer your experience is completely separate from the physical world. You have left the physical world to step into a virtual space. Gaming or scrolling through Google Maps would have
been seen as a disembodying experience. But the opposing and more recent argument is that the virtual is becoming more physical and the physical is becoming more virtual.
W: In which ways?
Naomi Ellis: From a material point of view, the Internet is physical, information is stored somewhere but people don't really think about it like that, they see it as infinite. In actual fact there are vast data bases dotted about the planet in specific geographic locations that rely on particular natural resources and conditions to function. Also all these
