“„We want new framework and for this framework, we want new skin. The digital world provides a potential space where this can play out. Through the digital, we make new worlds and dare to modify own. ” – Legacy Russel
“Myths are original revelations of the preconscious psyche, involuntary statements about unconscious psychic happenings, and anything but allegories of physical processes. Such allegories would be an idle amusement for an unscientific intellect. Myths, on the contrary, have vital meaning, Not merely do they represent, they are the psychic life of the primitive tribe, which immediately falls into pieces and decays when it loses its mythological heritage, like a man who has lost his soul” - Carl Jung
Mythology is a central mechanism of social understanding. Humans make meaning and contextualize ourselves in the stories of our tribes. What does this mean for a globalized era hyperfixated on surveillance and factuality, while troubled by deep-fakes and generative AI? Silver Crust Scenarios, by Vienna based digital artist Robert Tilbury, explores this terrain at the intersections between body, technology and mythology.
The works are assemblages of collected mobile phone photographs, digitally arranged and altered. Printed on multiple layers of acrylic glass, the works oscillate between photography, painting and sculpture. Tilbury’s compositions depict fragmented bodies and fluid environments: figures appear in states of metamorphosis, merging, colliding and dissolving into hybrid landscapes. Inspired by ancient mythology and the metamorphosis of Ovid, the series acts as a set of digital fairytales about memory, sexuality and identity in a technologized world. Bodies here are not stable vessels but contested sites of perception and transformation, constantly reshaped by digital culture, social media, and geopolitical forces.
The figures in Gala Priest, seated around a table, recall both the social media ritual of photographing (and being photographed) while dining, and the Feast of Tantalus. In collapsing these narratives Tilbury asks the viewer to consider a taboo. Tantalus blasphemed the gods by serving them his son, whereas these figures serve up themselves – collapsing the boundaries between subject and object, observer and the observed.
SILVER CRUST SCENARIOS responds directly to urgent contemporary questions: how do digital images shape our understanding of the body? How do technology and media alter narratives of intimacy, identity and belonging? By staging conflicts and entanglements between figures and spaces, these works reveal the tension between coexistence and rupture that defines today’s social and political realities.
text by Orion Jenkins
technical and production support, curatorial collaboration
Jan Bražina, Marie Vařeková
