Versions

2012 - Film & Video (Film & Video)
6:00 minutes

Oliver Laric

year born: 1981

gender: male

nationality: Austrian

Oliver Laric’s video Versions is part of an ongoing body of work that has continued to evolve and mutate over time. Comprised of several video and sculptural works that share the same title, the Versions series reflects Laric’s key concerns: the mutability of images and objects and the negotiation between original and copy. In this video, we see several 3D renders of recognizable objects and places, while an ubiquitous feminized robotic voice that evokes the domestic familiarity of voice recognition tools such as Siri and Alexa, speaks of issues relating to identity, language, and translation. Formally, these concepts are reflected through strategies of doubling, mirroring, translating, transferring and mimicking: images of ancient Greek busts are reproduced in postal stamps for Mali and Peru; two popular Disney characters dancing side by side reveal how the same motion was used for both of them; and iconic basketball moments are immortalized both through photographs and interpretations in Manga comics. In addition to the formal strategies, there’s an array of historical references that bring the same concerns to the fore, including a piece by piece architectural render of the Ise Shrine, which is demolished and rebuilt every 20 years as part of Shinto belief system of death, renewal, and the impermanence of all things. Another key reference that appears in many of Laric’s videos and sculptural works is the bust of Chinese military strategist Sun Tzu, Laric’s interest centered around the proliferation of adaptations of his ancient military treatise Art of War, which have been disseminated globally.

Oliver Laric is a Berlin-based, Austrian multimedia artist whose work is centered around issues of authorship, originality, and ownership—with a specific interest in visual culture in the digital age. His work and broad research addresses an ongoing history of the mutability of objects and images. From ideas of copyright to examples of iconoclasm (the destruction of religious iconography), Laric’s focus is on how objects and images are continually re-represented, appropriated, remixed, augmented and modified. Several of Laric’s work evolve over time, at times relying on the voracious contribution of online communities. From 2006–2012, for example, Laric was part of the project VVORK, an art blog as exhibition space, which gained a large following and led to the group working as a curatorial collective. He has also collaborated with a range of museums to make 3D scans of sculptures available and free to download online. Even his own sculptural practice is often based on versions of classical and neoclassical sculptures, which he then reinterprets. His interest in reinscribing or opening up material, however, is not in the new or hybrid objects that result, but rather the moment of transfer, the metamorphosis of objects into other objects or images, and the endless potential of mutability. That is what Laric tries to capture.

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