Specter
It is always nighttime in the Metaverse

Autophagy (2021)
Alice 元 Zhang





How does making avatars affect your sense of identity?

“The social media landscape reifies a contemporary culture that posits us as individuals. In truth, we are only ourselves in living process and constellation with each other—as ancestors, descendants, close conspirators, distant kin. To deepen our senses across this relational geography, we can make use of the digital realm not as a vanity mirror, but as a scrying mirror. I want to seed spells in pixels, posts, portals and proxies to break into many more cosmologies of commoning.”

About the work:
All life-forms are processes. In this self-portrait, the artist is represented by her body, the land she lives on, and the parasitic fungus, Ophiocordyceps. A traditional endless knot hovers, alluding to the cycle of rebirth in Buddhist teachings from her upbringing.

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