some inevitable future., 2016





some inevitable future. from Rebecca Uliasz on Vimeo.


If a being from a different planet were to try and examine our society in the way that an ethnographer might try and examine an unknown culture, they may become incredibly confused. With the mediation of our lives in so many different forms, virtual and augmented, intimate and informational, a historical ethnography of a society’s relationship to physical communal space no longer suits our reality. The integration of technologies of connectivity and automation of every day life processes has created a reality of multiplicity, one in which interfaces and physical reality stack, shift, and blend into an amorphous reanimation of space and time.



“some inevitable future” presents an exploration of mediated worlds through the depiction of four similar but alternate virtual ecosystems, each with their own physics of space-time. In positing these alternate realities side by side, perhaps we might consider the blurring of physical and virtual boundaries in our own realities and examine the ways in which alternate worlds function in our everyday lives.


This two-week long installation utilized four screens that constantly ran for the duration of the piece. The four time systems depicted were as follows:

1. A pre-rendered simulation, slowed down to wilt overthe course of two weeks.
2. A live stream of a plant in a remote location, deprived of water and sunlight for two weeks.
3. A live stream of a computer screenm depicting a live feed of a virtual plant in the game world of the MMO Second Life.
4. A pre-rendered simulation of a plant wilting, connected to an IR sensor so that the plant only wilts when a viewer is engaging the piece. The dead plant rejuvinates every 5 minutes.





some inevitable future. install documentation from Rebecca Uliasz on Vimeo.