Computer Augmented Portrait

John Rainey presented collection "Insurgency" at the exhibition of graduate projects of the Royal College of Art. A series of hybrid objects that explore the instability of identity in the fusion of real and virtual.

Remember film The Lawnmower Man? Main character Lawrence Angelo would experiment with virtual reality, an immersive system that engages every sense. Real and virtual were two separate worlds, but in the synthetic dimension of the protagonist they blend and gradually erase all humanity and identity.

We’re talking about a movie from the 90s. Virtual reality would develop primarily for videogames, while it’s social networks that would later explode into a full-fledged phenomenon. And simulation would thus take over the territory of human relations. From Facebook onwards, the digital filter to our socialization has spread like wildfire.

So much so that the boundary between real and virtual, public and private, is now very unstable. John Railey’s sculptures set off from this fact and explore how images, their reproduction and our synthetic identity is represented and transmitted in various media.

His series is populated by embryos at a halfway between human and digital, created from photos of a real Facebook profile and later re-elaborated and reproduced on ceramic with high definition 3D printers and machines for rapid prototyping.

Photos via johnrainey.co.uk