TRANSFER PROTOCOL presents four artists negotiating the translation of information across platforms and media in the age of technological change. Projections of the near-future have become increasingly polarized: we’re either patiently waiting for the Kurzweilian singularity, or as Douglas Coupland recently suggested, “maybe there’s no next big thing in tech.” Whichever future we have to look forward to (or fear for), the augment of Virtual Reality gives us insight into both predictions.

From Prehistory to Postmodernity, we have been striving to escape ourselves; to augment our bodies beyond their physical limitations. ‘Virtual Reality’ is as old as early humans’ ritual, hours-long seclusion in caves that resulted in hallucinations elevating them to virtual states. On one hand, VR is a fully immersive and promising avenue to new experiences and realities; on the other, it’s a failure to meet our imagined expectations of where technology can take us.

We are always striving to see beyond the horizon.

Josh Anderson (Cincinnati, OH) is a photographer who uses his commercial sensibility to deconstruct, invert, and unpack the images used for advertisements. He reassembles these elements in new and absurd ways, ultimately forcing the consumer system back into itself. Instead of instructing the viewer to ‘buy this now’, Anderson favors a system of subjectively interpreting the consumption/production relationship.

Ryan Duffin (Alberta, CA/ NYC) uses photography to bring forth the underlying forces of reality, thus moving the medium beyond a strictly analogue/digital dialogue. His keen ability to capture metaphysical moments is attributed to his engagement with a spectrum of photographic technologies: from photographs to photograms, 3D models to VR simulations, Duffin’s work pushes our conception of photography to new, and beautifully uncharted terrain.

Thorben Eggers (Düsseldorf, DE) gives painting contemporary significance by employing the iconography of digital media as subject matter in his paintings. His interest in the relationship between photography and painting, and thus analogue and digital, is translated and processed onto his large-scale surfaces. CD-ROMs, SD Cards, DVDs, and other computational memory devices dominate the imagery in his series, Media, which itself acts as a memory device, archiving the nostalgia of recent past. Eggers’ work fundamentally questions how we perceive reality through representation, asserting his work as a kind of simulation of this questioning.