There's A Silver Arrow Sticking Out Of Your VR Headset

Olivia Erlanger, 'If Today Were Tomorrow', Image courtesy of Sean Flemming.

By SABRINA ROMAN July 4, 2024

“There is no fixed reality, no single perception of the world” wrote Deepak Chopra, “just numerous ways of interpreting world views as dictated by one’s nervous system and the specific environment of our planetary existence”. Olivia Erlanger’s naiad tails in washing machines and life-sized, utopian snow globes, fit facilely into our cosmos of VR headsets and artificial intelligence creations that have encouraged those who interact with them to either blindly ride through a Manhattan bus lane whilst aboard an electric skateboard or hold a doughnut aloft whilst endeavouring to instigate an interaction alongside a virtual butterfly; to press control c and control v on Steven Spielberg, “technology can be our best friend, and technology can also be the biggest party pooper of our lives. It interrupts our own story, interrupts our ability to have a thought or a daydream, to imagine something wonderful, because we’re too busy bridging the walk from the cafeteria back to the office on the cell phone.”  

In comparison, there’s no such presence, of so much as a flip-phone in the artist's ‘If Today Were Tomorrow’ project at Houston’s Contemporary Art Museum, largely because the circumstances she’s interpreted are programmed to come across as being indiscernible, and yet not entirely oracular either, rather they contemplate the point we find ourselves beginning to sleepwalk into a corporeality where we glitch between an unstimulated pantomime of neither consciousness nor unconsciousness and thus, are powered on and off by vagary and anarchy. “The first iteration of this ongoing interest in appliances was at Kunstverein Gartenhaus,” Erlanger remarked over the course of our conversation. “I was researching the histories of domestic technologies—looking at their non-normative contributors, how they came to be, how they exist within a social construction—and wrote a series of essays. Each looks to a different object: the refrigerator, the oven, showers. While conceiving that project, I realized that I wanted to do something within an institutional context.”

Olivia Erlanger, 'Appliance', Image courtesy of Daniel Terna.

Opening our eyes to the plausibility that we live in a holographic, phantasmic society, is ‘If Today Were Tomorrow’s contemporary, short, ‘Appliance’ (2024) creation; whose apologue comes to life by charging itself off of the multidisciplinary’s theatrical ‘Humour in the Water Coolant’. Although, unlike the latter, this creative project, also production orientated, effervescently contemplates the current that we, as observers, and provocateurs, plug ourselves into, in our pursuit of the idealised escapism that differentiating, technological corporealities summon. To forthrightly scroll more broadly into the terms and conditions associated with German philosopher Martin Heidegger’s determination that technology espouses a particular way of divulging the actuality, a revealing that is understood by human entities taking puissance from reality.``The literary scholar Alisson Waller describes how fantastical realism contests reality by showing things not how they are, but how they are not,'' explains the artist, “I think the darker aspects of what I’m dealing with, while I find them entertaining, are also a very heightened, camp directive in the same way that the more overtly humorous or overtly dreamier projects are.”

Certainly, there is a nefariousness to ‘If Today Were Tomorrow’ that pierces the observer’s consciousnesses as decidedly as the silver projectiles lodged into the setting staircase. In the latter’s circumstance, a paint and repair operation may suffice, however, when it concerns the former, it wouldn’t be entirely electrifying if the scars left behind reflected the dioramas on display that could be interpreted as considering the metamorphosing panorama of our screen orientated dependency.  

Olivia Erlanger, 'If Today Were Tomorrow', Image courtesy of Sean Flemming.

Simultaneously, those above, artistic realisations also, one would speculate, reflect on the futility of the American dream, another central conceptualisation of the artist, beyond the parameters of the domicile, where she, herself, has imagined various characters including Callie Hernandez’s ‘Sophie’ who plays a young woman tormented by her home’s appliances and ‘Crystal’, who is portrayed by Sasha Frolova as a clairvoyant brought in to confront the structure’s abnormal occurrences. “I wrote, ‘I love stories because they alter how we think, not only of ourselves but of our surroundings, it’s through consuming stories that we’re able to project into the lives of others, to understand difference, to cosplay our worst fans and exact our deepest desires’ the artist points out. “So, I feel like that interest is also what’s so exciting about sci-fi fantasy, speculative realism, all of this is essentially about trying to understand more of our reality by proposing how it is not.” Orbiting themselves around this notion  at light speed are muted sculptures of spartan, developed macrocosms including ‘Prime Meridian’ (2024) that features a diagram of the I-95 highway. As with everything else in this art show, it’s merely a matter of deciding where you want to journey, or more appropriately, tap yourself into, first. WM