CLOSE ENCOUNTERS #9: Nieves de la Fuente Gutiérrez
The web series CLOSE ENCOUNTERS makes the wide range of media artistic work in NRW (North Rhine-Westfalia) visible. For many years and decades, outstanding positions in this field have been located in the region, and it is a great pleasure for us to meet some of these artists and present them in video portraits. Step by step, this provides an overview of the diversity of media art that is characteristic of NRW. In previous episodes, we had the pleasure of meeting the artist duo Jana Kerima Stolzer and Lex Rütten, video artist and photographer Nico Joana Weber, performance artist Vanja Smiljanić, photographer Axel Braun, artist Isabella Fürnkäs, collective sputnic, filmmaker Silke Schönfeld, media artist Vesela Stanoeva and media art fellow Ani Schulze. We are now delighted to present a new episode with artist Nieves de la Fuente Gutiérrez.
CLOSE ENCOUNTERS #9: Nieves de la Fuente Gutiérrez in conversation with Thomas Spies
In the 9th episode of CLOSE ENCOUNTERS, artist Nieves de la Fuente Gutiérrez talks to media scientist Thomas Spies about her creative process in digital and analogue space. In her mixed-reality works, the artist explores virtual experiences and the resulting insights for our real environment. Nieves uses virtual reality, gaming scenarios and other technologies to recreate places and enable users to experience extended worlds. She interweaves real-world and virtual experiences with human and non-human perspectives to illustrate the impact of our actions and the Anthropocene on nature and our environment. And she comments on contemporary phenomena such as the ubiquitous presence of technology in our everyday lives and the self-perception of man-made interventions in the landscape.
In conversation with Thomas, Nieves talks about her work, what role glitches play for her and where autobiographical traces can be discovered in her work.
Nieves de la Fuente Gutiérrez combines virtual reality, 360-degree or sound installations, audio walks or holograms in complex immersive spatial scenarios in her artistic work, interweaving the documentary with the fictional, the autobiographical with the technological. Nieves explores central socio-political questions. What is the nature of our living space, this territory that connects all beings, and how is it constituted? The core idea for the artist is a human, but above all non-human agency/power to act in the context of a network-like society that recognises the interconnection of the most diverse entities, as developed in the Actor-Network-Theory in the context of Science and Technology Studies by Bruno Latour, among others.
More Info on Nieves
Thomas Spies completed his doctorate on the representation of trauma in computer games at the University of Cologne. As an interdisciplinary researcher, writer and teacher, he critically analyses audiovisual media, especially video games, with regard to their socio-cultural implications. He is co-editor of the anthology ‘Spiel*Kritik: Kritische Perspektiven auf Videospiele im Kapitalismus’ (Game*Critique: Critical Perspectives on Video Games in Capitalism) and organiser of the event series ‘Let’s Play Critical’.
