DANA RYASHY
HERE
2020
Site-specific multimedia installation. HERE web network: Javascript,
Three js (JavaScript 3D Library) Node js (JavaScript runtime environment).
Monitor, desk and chair may differ in dimensions.
Artist statement
HERE is an exploration of the perception of a presence in a networked environment, detached from the notion of identity and disassociated with any physical body. In HERE, the players customize a randomly generated gemstone avatar, wander around a cloudy sky-resembling three-dimensional space in search of other presences and, if they happen to collide with each other, they form a star. With time, the sky becomes populated with traces of those social interactions.
Photo by Guy L’Heureux
Artist’s biography
Dana Ryashy is a Montreal-based digital designer creating works involving interactive and procedurally generated visual experiences. She researches ways of combining her academic background in biology, informatics, and design into physical and virtual installations. Switching from clinical and laboratory research to freelance graphic design, Ryashy now enjoys working with people, computational tools, and networked environments. Her work explores the flow and transformation of information between technological media and the human senses. After being featured in the Convergence Initiative and presented at the CCIFF VR Tech summit, she is currently looking to help start-ups at District 3 innovate with thoughtful technologies.
Photo by Guy L’Heureux
Essay
A Space Just to Be
Author Zoe Johnston
Artist Dana Ryashy
Artwork HERE, 2020
Dana Ryashy’s celestial web experience, HERE, is an ever-changing three-dimensional digital space in which users leave behind tangible traces of their interactions with other online presences, thereby offering a remediated experience of online social platforms or even in-person interactions. The vestiges of our relationships, imagined as digital renderings of masses of stone, remind the audience of the real impacts the digital social landscape can have on our lives. In HERE, users can generate their own unique agglomeration of precious stone, metal, and rock, rendered in a JavaScript programming interface. These randomly generated artifacts signify a human presence within Ryashy’s abstract digital realm, which resembles the threshold between the earth’s cloudy atmosphere and outer space. As the stone artifacts are released into digital space, users can navigate freely through the environment, encountering other visitors who are also personified as an abstract gemstone. A collision between two players results in the creation of a star, thereby acknowledging the interaction of the players in digital space. The star-filled landscape, therefore, functions not only as a site for virtual interaction, but also as an archive of past meeting places. When a visitor leaves the space, their gemstone disappears with them, leaving only a trace of their presence through the stars they have created. To re-enter the network, visitors must create a new gemstone, as their presence in the network does not rely on the continuity of their identity, but rather, on their existence within the space at a moment in time.
Photo by Guy L’Heureux
[…] why do I perceive that gemstone in front of me as a different entity, as someone alive?
The digital realm of HERE is parallel to that of the physical realm through our surpassing desire to leave a trace upon the world. Often, the most significant impact we leave behind are our relationships. Ryashy explains: “The richness and appearance of this networked environment is thus defined by the past and current presences in it.”1 The space that Ryashy has created becomes a communal ground for visitors to contribute to something larger than the individual, while capturing the coexistence of various temporalities, inhabiting both the past and present through the vestiges of digital interactions.
While the work enables interaction between visitors, the anonymity provided by the personified gemstones lends itself more to a presence than a real-life identity tied to a face or a name, as we often encounter on social media. In HERE, presence goes beyond identity, mimicking the phenomena of a felt presence without a corresponding body, similar to that of a spirit or divine being. The artist comments: “I like playing with the senses and the perception of those senses… Why do I perceive that gemstone in front of me as a different entity, as someone alive?”2 Ryashy’s inquiry into the relationship between computational machines and human perception explores our capacity to sense human presence within the virtual realm. The gemstone artifacts reflect the uniqueness and organic nature of the visitor that created them, while simultaneously negating individuality through their anonymity. Visitors can simply exist in a liminal space between the digital and the tangible: a networked space just to be.
- Dana Ryashy, Artist’s statement for HERE (2020).
- Dana Rayashy in conversation with the author, 16/06/2021.
Author’s biography
Zoe Johnston is in her fourth year of undergraduate studies in Concordia University’s department of Art History. She has previously contributed to the Concordia Undergraduate Journal of Art History (CUJAH) and interned with Serai, as local non-profit publication. Her interests lie in socially and critically engaged contemporary art that incorporate the body, new media, interactivity, and community.
