by Artistic Research PhD Candidates of the University of Applied Arts Vienna.
Supervisor: Ruth Anderwald + Leonhard Grond
My research questions the potentials of belonging and emotional care in phygital communities with a focus on new pedagogies that support desegregation, fight polarization and discriminating data. I aim to elevate connection, seek higher alternatives, and gaze in the Eye of the Hurricane in this dizzy period of birthing a potential AI.
My methodology is based on my lived and virtual experiences. As an immigrant moving between various countries and cultures, I embody and have been learning how continuously rerooting in different localities, nurturing and oscillating between offline and online, long distance relationships long before #movingonline become the new default. In 2018, I started to grow a virtual social housing neighbourhood, a multi-layered art project that considers the possibilities and dangers of ‘home’ in cyberspace. My research journals these experiences and the learning curve of developing the communal aspects of this project; for example, a social VR art residency programme called VR Art Camp.
My study excavates the potentials of cyber topophilia through reflecting on my personal case of growing up in the late communism of Hungary, being privileged to move abroad to South Korea, California and British Columbia and the attempts to plant seeds of love in the void of VR as a compass for my homesick heart. My practices support the development of post-pandemic pedagogical tools for new generations to inhabit and shape the Metta-verse* with good intentions and care.
*I switched using the trite term metaverse as the well-known corporation expropriated these commons, rather referring to the meditation practice.
Judit Navratil is a transdisciplinary artist working with social VR and extended reality in balance with her embodied and social practices. As an immigrant in various cultures, she explores the potentials of phygital care, belonging and ‘home’ in cyber-space. Judit Navratil is a transdisciplinary artist working with social VR and extended reality in balance with her embodied and social practices. As an immigrant in various cultures, she explores the potentials of phygital care, belonging and ‘home’ in cyber-space.
Navratil earned an MFA in Painting at the Hungarian University of Fine Arts in 2008 and an MFA at the California College of the Arts in San Francisco in 2019. She has been exhibiting in the United States, Hungary, Canada, France, and Korea. She is currently an affiliate artist at the Headlands Center for the Arts.
www.juditnavratil.com
www.vrartcamp.net