“Sometimes I’m confusing the RL and SL. I don’t know where I am” – China Tracy, i.Mirror
A term Information Age has become popular since the invention of World Wide Web and personal computers in 1990s and we can now learn the information before the actual experiences. My work focuses at concepts of reality and unreality in relation to new media and digital culture. I started exploring the theme from ‘hikikomori’ phenomenon in Japan where people who are commonly immersed in the internet, computer games, anime and manga withdraw from society and confine themselves in their rooms which subsequently led me to study the popular culture of television and animation, then subliminal effects and sound signals as hidden languages for my work.
Subliminal effects are widely used in advertising: George Bush’s RATS campaign and Australian Coca Cola poster in 80s for famous banned examples. This proves the information we perceive everyday is naturally mere collections of modifiable visual and sound patterns, and physical reality transferred into digital media is no longer the same but altered reality. When our brains perceive such information unconsciously, how much can we trust ourselves, and how real the virtual can be?
China Tracy, an avatar of the Chinese artist Cao Fei, comments in i.Mirror her documentary film of an online role-playing computer game Second Life that any world is an abyss and to go to virtual world is the only way to forget about the real darkness. My series as a whole became a sceptical and mediating piece to question our position at both physical and mind reality in this digital age.