![]() ![]() ![]() It is presented at the Zeppelin Museum as a recording of the artist immersed in the game, projected onto a wall. Becoming Dragon, by Micha Cárdenas, is a 2008 mixed-reality performance in which the artist dramatized her experience in the online game Second Life. Yellow guardrails, seemingly ripped from a Metro somewhere, gently guide visitors through the open-concept space. From sunny halls to darkened corridors to spartan rooms, there’s attention to flow and presentation that enlivens every aspect of the exhibition. One shows virtual reality being used to train American soldiers, while the other shows how it helps treat the PTSD they suffer as a result of the wars they fight (Harun Farocki, Serious Games I & III, 2010). About halfway through the exhibition, two films dueling on opposite walls complete a terrible loop. Where once zeppelins became flagships for fascism, so too have virtual technologies abetted a contemporary variant on that ideology. This is, after all, an exhibition about the political uses of technology. ![]() The parallels are dark, and perhaps all too apposite. For head curator Ina Neddermeyer, this primitive virtual world was a vital preface to the cutting-edge realms that form the exhibition. Each viewfinder contains a sample of stereoscopic images used to promote zeppelins in the early twentieth century, black-and-white photos refracted into a 3-D illusion. They’re tethers between this exhibition on virtual reality and its unlikely venue, a provincial German institution devoted to the history of airship technology, housed in a gorgeous Bauhaus railway station. The first thing you see as you walk into the Zeppelin Museum’s “Schöne Neue Welten” (Beautiful New Worlds) exhibition are little viewfinders, dangling on springs. Perhaps it’s the ever-so-slight motion that catches your eye. ![]()
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