Vast amounts of pictures, sounds, videos and 3D scans are organized as environments in Rebecca Merlic’s The City as a House, in the form of an interactive visual novel. A work about the experiment of a white European 30-year-old heterosexual human living in Tokyo without inhabiting a private apartment over a period of time. A speculative exploration of the possibilities of abolishing known forms of habitation.
Credit: Rebecca Merlic
Credit: Rebecca Merlic
Credit: Rebecca Merlic
Credit: Rebecca Merlic
Project Credits / Acknowledgements
Processing: Vivien Schreiber
Sound design: Manuel Riegler
Artist talk: Manuela Hillmann, Rebecca Merlic
Curator: Manuela Hillmann, Philipp Pess
Biography
Rebecca Merlic, *1989 in Germany, retreats between Tokyo, Munich and Vienna. She recently graduated with distinction at the Academy of Fine Arts, where she studied under Wolfgang Tschapeller, Francois Roché and Michael Hannsmeyer. In her studies she specialized on analogue and digital art as well as architecture. Her work is strongly influenced by alternative ways of society and transgression in socioeconomic conventions as well as new forms of architectural production employing new technologies.
During her masters she was able to study at Astushi KITAGAWARA Lab at Tokyo University of the Arts GEIDAI. She is a holder of the Marianne von Willemer Prize 2020 for digital media and the merit scholarship of the City of Vienna. Currently she is working on the topic of social inclusion at the American Arts Incubator – Austria with lead artist Rashin Fahandej. Her work is also on display at ADAF Athens Digital Arts 2020 in Greece.
VENT gallery
Vienna-based VENT gallery promotes international and local rising artists in contemporary visual arts, curated in solo and group exhibitions as well as performative formats. VENT gallery’s program is focused on researching the artificial meaning of media by implementing technologies from the late 20th and 21st centuries into the artistic process and analyzing their social potential. VENT gallery focuses on the artistic and curatorial exploration of futurality. Futurality describes incidents of the future that are already inscribed into the present as diffuse phenomena of so-called “hyper-objects.“
