Artist Statement

Creating new forms of agency to match the altered realities of our time: Presence.

As humans evolve, we find new ways to harness the capabilities of our brains. Access to localities other than one’s own home, “other worlds”, was first physical through travel and visitors’ oral histories and written documents. Analog voice and imaging devices followed, providing news and cultural content gleaned, produced, and shared remotely. Marconi developed wireless over the air communications and “other worldly” information and entertainment spread globally. The digital revolution we are all living in continues to enhance, broaden, and offer wholly new ways for connecting, sharing knowledge, feelings, experiencing “other worlds,” creating and enjoying Art.

VR and AR provide fundamentally new opportunities for people to meet, share, communicate and enjoy purely digital environments, with Digital ART works in Virtual Worlds, or placed in “real world” settings.

It’s about “presence”, experiencing life, interacting with people, seeing, and enjoying art, in a Virtual Environment where one feels oneself there: “present”, where the laws of physics as we experience them on Earth don’t apply. It’s about adding something without corporeal reality to one’s environment, where it occupies visual and perhaps auditory space, along with whatever already exists in the “real world” environment.

I not only create art in a Virtual World but I create new ways to view and enjoy my artworks, in Virtual Worlds, as AR objects and AR Enhanced Paintings on Canvas.

My paintings on Canvas begin as “cropped” images from 3DVR sculptures that I paint with colored light in a virtual reality environment. The paintings on Canvas can also be experienced with their AR enhancements. This enables viewers to have the interactive/immersive experience of standing and walking around in the 3DAR light sculpture as it surrounds them in the room, in front of the painting.

Darcy Gerbarg May 2023

Darcy Gerbarg Working at the Future Reality Lab New York University, Courant Institute of Mathematical Sciences, NYC, NY