SetOutputWorld (called with a world of the wrong size) engages with practices of world-building and myth-making by treating organic objects found at sites of personal pilgrimage as fragments of a geologic body. Through a series of fabricated reliquaries, object identification worksheets, and a navigable virtual terrain, the project plays with ideas of speculative archeology, material alchemy, and encapsulation. At the core of the work is a fascination with the double-edged sword of preservation and the history of plastic as a once utopian and now dystopian material. Through varying shifts in scale, the reliquaries are mirrored in the virtual environment as satellite locales - a (post)anthropocenic narrative of environmental destruction in the name of digital preservation and virtual resolution.
This installation presents the series in the form of a pseudo-museological exhibit. Three circular projections showed the navigator's front and peripheral vision. There were 12 sites in the virtual environment corresponding with the sculptures and a range of hidden characters that each delivered parts of a narrative.
The virtual models are derived from an earlier series of sculptures Future Reliquaries. Images like the one to the left are from a series of prints made by capturing scenes in the virtual environment.
Below is a video documenting the SetOutputWorld and all its components. Early versions of the project can be found in The 3D Additivist Cookbook devised and edited by Morehshin Allahyari and Daniel Rourke.
