The Shipping (2021) is a hybrid collection like no other. It consists of ten uniquely designed pieces of digital furniture that can be deployed by their owners on every existing metaverse or simply enjoyed as an astoundingly beautiful computer generated image on any screen. Half of them, however, are also shipped to the buyers as solid and fully functional house fittings crafted exactly like their intangible counterparts. Except the futuristic “TimeTable”, which is the result of a collaboration with Isern Serra, every item in The Shipping has existed first and for a while just as an idea in the mind of Andrés Reisinger and then only as a computer generated render.
A few of them, however, are now also a part of the physical world and subject to influences and transformations the incorporeal originals will never know. This eerily duplicated presence lays down a partial bridge between the two dimensions, and puts into question that all too familiar contemporary divide opposing whatever we see through our omnipresent visual display units on one side, and the stuff we can still touch and feel with our natural bodies on the other.
With The Shipping, Reisinger transports the same, self-standing, computer-generated compositions in two different directions, which in turn mark a pair of forking paths for those willing to interact with them. On one hand, all of the pieces become props in the open, immersive, virtual worlds known as “metaverses”. There, they can be seen from every possible perspective and even used by the avatars that traverse those intangible realms. On the other hand, five of his designs venture onto the material plane, where they can be seen too, albeit under a different light (actual pieces of furniture do not glow as screens do), and also used, but by biological entities, with all their peculiar sensitivities and limitations. The aesthetic tension thus achieved is almost insuperable: “aisthētikós” (αἰσθητικός) means pertaining to sensory perception, but how should this be understood in this context? Are sight and hearing the only senses for aesthetic enjoyment, as traditional thinkers have taught? What happens when an electronic interface stands in their way? And finally, what could be the synesthetic consequences of adding touch to this equation?
(Florencio Noceti)