Cyborgs Genesis is one of the very first series created by Frenetik Void in 2017. The development of this research led the artist to explore the innermost corners of the human psyche. By updating some of the most peculiar visual aspects of traditional Surrealist art, he often uses symbols that represent emotions and psychic mechanisms. This longstanding interest in the labyrinthine human mind finds its peak in “Cyborg Genesis”; composed by three distinct works, it's the embodiment of an identity crisis that refers to the very concepts of "form" and "life", an approach that reminds the one proposed by the Italian dramatist, novelist and poet Luigi Pirandello (1867-1936) at a time when the theories of Sigmund Freud and Carl Jung were changing the public perception of what defined an individual as such. A person is like a river, they said; you can only see the surface but will never grasp how deep it really is. The unconscious is the true psychical reality and our material existence is a trap locking our one hundred thousand refracted and fragmented alter egos. The masks, the glowing eyes and the dreamy scenes created by Frenetik Void mirror such ambiguous state of things.
A dark red cloth covers the only human in Nebulae. The naked female figure stares at us with blazing eyes, one of her hands busy holding up the tent-like cloth while the other hiding from our eyes what looks like a perfect sphere. The viewer feels to be an uninvited guest; we are not supposed to look at the female figure and she won't accept our presence. It's a self-confined scene that doesn't demand to be experienced by the public; the protagonist is happy with what she got, as if nothing could scratch her perfectly balanced situation. If we take a closer look, we see how difficult it is for her to maintain the pose; her body language tells us that what seems a well studied posture is in fact the result of external forces. She doesn't represent a perfect, single identity, but the struggle of pretending that such physical reality can exist in the first place.
In the background of Eyes Wide Open, a Roman white sculpture of a man is covered by a translucent rounded mask; in the foreground, a masked human figure looks away, as if she was shy or in a pensive state of mind. Branches of trees frame the scene, lit by spectral stage lights. There's no action in this work; everything stays still and the figures don't communicate with each other as if it was a stripped down Samuel Beckett's play. The identity of the figure in the foreground reminds a tree that falls in a desert, unheard; it exists, but in a nullifying state of things.
In Sleep Paralysis, a naked body elegantly lies on the floor, the face covered by a translucent mask. A titanic black hand seems asserting power over it, directing a transparent copy of the body in the air. The hallucinated scene is witnessed by many disembodied heads, floating in the background. This is the last stage for the individual's psyche; after exploring what it means to be someone unique ("Nebulae") and nobody ("Eyes Wide Open"), they finally come to terms with the fragmented nature of themselves. They're not a perfect single self and neither a mysterious nobody, but a kaleidoscopic individual, composed by many conflicting characters.
About Frenetik Void
As digital technologies change the definition of what it means to be human, the relationship between physical presence, virtual identity and digital corporeality becomes more diffuse. The work of Frenetik Void unfolds in a science-fiction environment, a post-human universe inhabited by mutating beings, hybrids in which limits are vanished.
Frenetik Void, Genesis Cyborgs is a series of digital artworks curated by MoCDA, Museum of Contemporary Digital Art.