Herding The Gaze Away From The Pasture
• a self-reflective virtual reality + multimedia video installation
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In the real-world, Grimes allows the spectator to examine their own perceptions of reality in an art gallery containing rendered versions of natural resources, static TVs and reflective surfaces. Once within the VR space, these same objects are repeated in the context of a virtual art gallery. The spectator eventually meets a mediated view of their real self through Grimes’ utilization of a live video-feed mechanism.
Now-a-days, people are accustomed to finding their sources of reality, culture, information and purpose via pieces of technology. The responses to which are often consumption without speculation. In times of climate crises, diminishing natural resources, meaning crises and questionable sources of the “real reality” as it’s disseminated to us; the piece fosters a self-reflective experience for social change, conversation and contemplation by probing both the nature of reality and the reality of nature.
In this project, Grimes points towards an experience of non-duality between earth, technology and self for the spectator. In the process he sparks curiosities surrounding phenomenology, systems of value, the attention economy, simulacra and historical-technological canons. His intent is to allow the spectator to see themselves as custodians of the earth's very real resources and to shed a light of mindfulness to the way some media imagery can misdirect us from this call to action.
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Under the moniker grimeography, Tyler Grimes (b. 1994 in Wilmington, DE) conceptually integrates a multidisciplinary approach as to ponder provocative paradoxes, curiosities, ontologies and our place in reality. Pulling influences from various schools of thought, he invites his viewers to manifest ideas that may help them discover more about their own subjective experience of being.
Recently, he has been interested in mediated technological experiences as sources of truth and how that reality can be manufactured and disseminated. This research manifests through multimedia works which explore self-awareness through bodily consumption of: diet, dogma, and media. He has also been enjoying holding experimental interviews with the earth itself as if to ask “how it feels” about being portrayed as a marketable object-machine to point to the inherent intelligence in nature. This research still carries him, as he sees these motifs as paramount in today’s media-saturated world.