about
Nacoca Ko
Nacoca Ko is a phygital artist in Geneva, Switzerland. Her work is a near-future exploration where virtual images infiltrate a rifted materiality, seeding new cultural narratives. Questioning how recent technology impacts our psyche, she moves between raw matter, concise digital image, video, and virtual worlds to investigate consciousness and our experiences of reality.
“Our global culture is woven from will and imagination - the ideas from our minds that create a chair, a social media community, a food redistribution program, a spaceship, a mine for raw materials… our cognition spreads out to affect every aspect of existence on this planet. As we question the sustainability of our current systems, I find it very compelling to look at how we operate as a link between technology and nature, defining the source and perpetuation of our society.”
Statement
Maybe there are some random mutations, but we all knew for a long while, that the oral histories we pass down are an intuitive mimicry of the way our DNA passes stories to the next generation. Reproduction is an Epigenetic Incantation. Heat-seeking missiles penetrate humans one by one. Viral memes infect them with parasitic mind control, nano infusions recode their DNA. We risk disappearing from the inside out.
Her work is an examination of fleeting futures which she translates by worlding new systems sympoietically, organically. Seeing art in itself as the model- Humankind becomes an unwitting network, a network that returns to mimic the web of Nature, working in symbiosis with non-human and artificial intelligence to create a new potential harmony.
Her process focuses on forms that transcend their original media, moving from the digital to the material and back again.
By digging into materials such as concrete, styrofoam, and washed-up plastics she reveals the sedimentary layer of waste humans leave as evidence of their existence on the planet, a fuel for the imagination of history. The tangible effect of our material impact works as an entry point for transformation in the worlds she imagines.
Algorithms and avatars give rise to a different aesthetic. Working with digital media, she animates the anxiety of acceleration, distorts landscapes, and crosses boundaries between the codes of what is real.
We are pushed through progress, squeezed, immersed in new realms. Everything around us moves exponentially- we fall into vertigo, robbed of prediction, stability and a sense of concrete matter. And yet we keep climbing the wall, staying with the singularity. Our consciousness and will are sucked into a kind of liminal haze. But the liminal is just the place where energy and ideas are transmitted to materiality, a phygital space where dreams are transcribed into language.
Looping from futurism, she looks backward toward tribal anthropology. What did those wise sages know, looking out at the unmapped stars? What meaning and understanding did they have, that we may have lost, relinquishing our slow rites of passage and a sense of oneness? Sourcing from the universality of humankind throughout time, she brings with her some of the mystery, magic, and mutiny.