Refigured

This artwork exists online on artport, the Whitney Museum's portal to Internet and new media art. 

View The Maw Of on artport

Rachel Rossin’s The Maw Of is a transmedia story, a narrative unfolding across multiple platforms and formats. It reflects on the ways in which our bodies and minds are increasingly merging with—and invasively altered by—technology. 

Central to the animation is a ghostly female figure, rendered in the style of Japanese manga, who wanders through a landscape of layered interfaces, symbols, and codes associated with technological and organic systems. Over the course of the animation, elements of content from the Whitney Museum’s website intermingle with a graph of the nervous system and a web console exposing scripting operations, and parental-control alerts give way to infrared imagery used for target acquisition in military operations. The on-screen QR code can be used to launch the augmented reality (AR) component of the work. Synched with the browser-based animation, the AR layer features additional textual commentary and transports the central anime figure out of the browser window directly onto your mobile device.

The animation was co-commissioned by the Whitney Museum of American Art with KW Institute for Contemporary Art, Berlin.