The UID (Unique Identifier :: Utopian Inspirational Daemon) Pavillion, explores the creation of a spatial utopia – a ‘non-place’ created from the maintained ruins of a deconsecrated 13th century church (a sacred space made secular) translated as a digital space transcending both the sacred and secularity of the physical. Exploring place as the empty shell or container of history while simultaneously exploiting and envisioning its potentialities is a key function of imagining Utopia.
The Wrong Biennale is entirely digital, existing through hundreds of decentralized websites and servers, acting as an umbrella conceit – a node of connection and creative drive between the individual pavilions. They exist both everywhere and nowhere at the same time.
The residency program at 33OC in Toffia, Italy, from which the gallery design has been drawn, functions in quite the opposite way; it is not trying to separate itself by way of decentralization but has embedded itself in its specific community through the occupation of the discarded religious space. The work done in the residency becomes almost exclusively for the residents of the village of Toffia, while exposing and including the residents in a globalized conversation. These vacillations between local and global are at the heart of the UID Pavillion.
The qualifying definitions of these conflicted spaces (digital/physical, sacred/secular, historical/speculative, rural/global) create dichotomies, separations – but in the act of translation from one to the other is created a liminal locale that has recently been referred to as a “para-real” space. A “para-real” space is a momentary “de-realisation whose boundaries can no longer be perceived—and whose effects are no longer separated.” This third space between the physical and digital (where the conceptual switching is done) is a space to explore hybridity, ephemerality, cohabitation, and co-creation; to think of oppositional states of reality as one in the same. It is in this “para-real” space that these installed works have the opportunity and potential to live and converse, where they might exist untapped, unsullied, unused, and unexplored; where a possible Utopia can be attained.
Curated by Ian Breidenbach (Findlay, OH), Caroline Turner-Anderson (Cincinnati, OH) and Ian Anderson (Cincinnati, OH)
Gallery Design and Unity Build by Ian Anderson
Website Design by Jacob Riddle (Moscow, ID)