MARTINA MENEGON
Generazione Critica: Your artistic practice revolves around the use of interactive art and extended reality as a means of exploring corporeality between the real and the virtual. Can you tell us about your training and how your practice has evolved?
Martina Menegon: My path is composed of many different experiences which, fortunately, have subsequently intertwined and mixed together. I was lucky enough to have grown up with computers (and then the internet) at home – I remember afternoons spent with kidpix, for example! Then the passion-obsession for Second Life where I spent 10 years creating and exploring virtual worlds, but above all the idea of Avatar and of a digital body in constant change. During my first studies at the Department of Visual and Performing Arts at the IUAV University of Venice I learned to use advanced 3D programs like Cinema4d and then software to create interactive experiences like maxMsp. Just during the last months before my graduation I attended Klaus Obermaier’s workshop, where I learned to combine my passion for 3D with interaction and started my artistic path in Interactive Art. Afterwards I moved to Vienna, where I studied Transmedia Art at the University of Applied Arts and here I started to experiment more and more with the virtual, the concept of Avatar and my complex relationship between the physical and virtual body. I have only recently noticed how all my passions and experiences have come together and formed what is my current artistic practice.
GC: The combination of real and virtual elements results in complex digital sculptures that challenge the very idea of corporeality. You use a very interesting phrase to describe this aesthetic, visual and formal peculiarity of your work: phygital corporeality. How does the process of creating your works take place? Does your investigation first start with the physical body and then move to its digital counterpart, or are they both on the same level?
MM: By exploring the relationship between physical and virtual reality in my work, I have tried from the beginning to create virtual experiences that are physically perceptible despite their virtual nature. At the time I called it “synthetic corporeality” but, especially in the last few years, this division between real and virtual has dissolved and I believe in a reality consisting equally of physical and virtual elements and have therefore decided to use the term “phygital” (physical + digital). I became aware of this word through Keiken’s work and even though I read many doubts about the term itself on Twitter, I haven’t found any alternatives for now.
My works always originate from the physical body transferred to the virtual through 3D scanning or photogrammetry. I am interested in how my body is read and interpreted by these increasingly handy tools, and how, thanks to this translation, a new body is born that is virtual in nature but extremely connected to its physical state of departure – and therefore in absolute co-existence. Furthermore, the idea of glitch as liberation from a binary system and the limitations of physical reality is extremely important to me, whereby, through various performative acts in the scanning process, I use my physical body (with all its limitations) to liberate and transform the resulting virtual body. So the digital body becomes an essential extension of my being and my body.
©Martina Menegon, Untouched, 2022, courtesy the artist
GC: Have you also experimented with 3D modelling and texturing programmes such as ZBrush, Maya or Blender, to name a few?
MM: Yes! I believe it is an essential part for an artist in the field of Digital Art to keep discovering and experimenting with different programs. Although my works are often software or simulations made in Unity3D, I like to use and experiment with many software in my creative process, such as Zbrush, Blender, Substance, Meshlab and online tools like sculptGL and NormalMap-Online. The list is very long! And even longer is the list of software and tools that I wish I had time to learn!
GC: Video sculpture and digital sculpture are hybrids that are grafted onto different visual languages. We are simultaneously dealing with video art, digital modelling, sculpture, photography, photogrammetry, in an interesting hybrid that subverts the very concepts of material and immaterial. Can you explain how this field of investigation has evolved over the years?
MM: This research came out of a strong need to connect with the several digital extensions created over the years. Although all these accounts, all these avatars, have been (and still are) part of me, they lacked a link, a deeper identification with my base body. I experienced them all as ideal bodies but at the same time never perfect, always changing. I therefore felt the need to start from my base body and experiment with 3D scanning to translate my physical one into a virtual one. At the time (2015) I only had a second-hand Kinect camera that I used for my interactive installations, and to my great surprise I discovered I could use it as a 3D scan. So I tried, alone at home, to create a three-dimensional selfie and the result was a virtual body full of “errors”, glitches, caused by this misuse of the 3D scanning technique. I felt a powerful connection with this new body, fragile but indestructible at the same time, free, fluid. And from that moment on, I never stopped experimenting and searching for new methods to create these virtual bodies.
©Martina Menegon, Untouched, 2022, Metronom, Installation view
GC: Another perspective that emerges from your practice is a process of continuous translation of your work. For example, for Metronom, you developed a video sculpture that is also paired with a QRCode to observe other iterations of it. Arguably, you could say that each intervention is part of a larger process of metamorphosis.
MM: Absolutely. I have always seen my works as processes, without a clear end and therefore as you suggested in continuous metamorphosis. I also like to work ‘site-specific’ in both virtual and physical realities, so my artworks often adapt to different spaces and installation possibilities. The project presented at Metronom is a perfect example! It is in fact an Augmented Reality sculpture – a three-dimensional selfie created by means of a 3D scanning technique in which I perform a continuous movement while being scanned to create an uncanny, grotesque, ‘glitched’ virtual body. Using the QR Code, one can access the virtual sculpture (collectable as NFT on versum.xyz) and – with compatible smartphones – the actual work in Augmented Reality. The idea is that these virtual bodies can be free of all the limitations and boundaries of my physical body, and can explore and inhabit spaces inaccessible to me. The iteration – or metamorphosis – in video format is for me a kind of addition to the AR work, a moving visual detail of the virtual body visible in its entirety only through Augmented Reality.
GC: Some of your digital sculptures are also presented as NFT. What is their role, in your opinion, in digital sculpture?
MM: Sophie Kahn, an artist I have admired for a long time and who continues to inspire me, wrote not long ago on Twitter “I’m interested in AR and NFTs as tools to distribute and view sculpture – a way to expand our understanding of what a sculpture can be”. Exactly this research into expanding the possibilities of a virtual sculpture and distributing it, via Augmented Reality, into our physical reality is something that fascinates me and I want to continue to explore. I am also very interested in the idea of uniqueness in the context of art editions – especially in the context of NFT. My works always have a random system that is somehow beyond my control. In the case of the “untouched” series for example, the interaction with the 3D model but especially the Augmented Reality, allows you to visualize the work – and therefore each edition – each time in a different way or in different places, creating a feeling of uniqueness and intimacy with it.
26/05/2022
©Martina Menegon, Untouched, 2022, Metronom, Installation view