Rachel Rossin's Digital Homes | Art21 "New York Close Up"

The way that I was making art

before I knew it was art,

it was like making homes.

Just trying to find home.

Florida is already a strange place

filled with a lot of contradictions
and strata of chaos.

Growing up, there was a lot of intensity

and my parents were just fully, fully overwhelmed.

So I think it was out of this idea,

escapism does end up being necessary.

It's interesting because I see so much of
that in my work still today.

The same things keep coming up.

["Rachel Rossin's Digital Homes"]

I started programming when I was around eight.

I was starting to use command line

and understand that, if I typed "print," then
I would print the thing.

Or I was making ASCII art, which means arranging
letters in a format

by just hitting the "enter" key a lot.

Just playing around.

But then when Windows 95 came out, I started
opening up EXE packages.

So I was seeing the backend.

I was opening video games.

I was opening the games that came loaded,
like Solitaire.

I was trying to figure out how to open that

and then would have to try to repair it because
it was the family computer.

It's just a lot of breaking things,

which I think is the best way to learn.

--Of course, nothing is working
now that you're here.

--I need to calibrate it.

My go-to tool for animation
is always motion capture

because I want to be able to see something
living behind

something that's typically pretty sterile.

--This thing is fun because it's like...

--You're also just kind of working with the
way it breaks.

--So it's like I've rigged this man to live
inside my hand.

--So the algorithm is trying to search for
a humanoid figure

--using markerless motion capture.

--And instead it has the only thing they can
latch onto as limbs:

--my fingers.

When I first started gaming,

I started saving the assets, like the 3D models
that I could find.

So I built up a library from when
I was quite young

[Rachel gaming at age 15]

and recovered a lot of the assets from those
hard drives.

["Skinsuits," 2019]

The first avatar that I remember consciously
using was a generic male avatar

and it was trying to find a neutrality in
the Internet that I was just navigating.

That is what led to "Man Mask."

I was just looking back and thinking about
when I was playing Call of Duty,

["Man Mask," 2019]

I took on this male avatar
to sort of live inside.

It was just like safety--

you're trying to find some sort of
point of neutrality.

There's this virtual avatar

that I've more or less kept in the studio
just for myself.

It's this harpy,

which is half human, half bird.

She, for me, represents how I feel very much
in two places at once.

She speaks to a reality that most people feel,

which is so much of our emotional and cognitive
space lived in virtual spaces.

But still...

being tethered to a "mortal coil."

[ROSSIN]
--Have you grabbed this guy?

[ASSISTANT]
--Yeah.

[ROSSIN] The installation is titled,
"I'm my loving memory."

The work is

eight plexiglass pieces that I formed

and an accompanying AR piece.

First they start as paintings--

digital paintings.

They're sourced from 3D renderings,

spaces that are fully virtual.

Then they're just printed out onto the plexiglass--

just UV printed out.

The way that the UV works is it's embedded
inside the plexi,

so that I can heat it enough

and then mold it.

They act so much as these hollow body
imprints of myself.

I'm physically using my body to form them.

I think of them as...

as shields.

["I'm my loving memory", 2020–2021]

The way that the work is installed is

it's important that it's shown with its shadow

because the AR piece blends with the shadows

that are made by the plexiglass.

When you walk into the installation,
you see the sculptures

and then you see this window
that's the AR piece.

Once you ask the AR piece to start,

there's this scene that unfolds
in front of you.

For myself, it always comes back to
my own embodiment

and how to anchor this very abstract,
loose space

in the same dimension that I'm in.

It's very sweet how, in a lot of ways,

the work doesn't change, it just...

looks different.

The heart is still there in a lot of ways.

["everyone's connected"]

--It's okay.