↪︎I↩︎ (Within Web of Mask) employs first-person 360-degree panoramic video as both a medium and method of practice, proposing that the “self” is itself a fictitious construct and exploring how this fiction profoundly shapes our perceptions, illusions, and ideologies.

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The work unfolds across three virtual reality scenes constructed through networks, characters, symbols, and digital sculptures. Within these environments, it explores the intersections of self-fictionality, trauma in identity perception, and phenomenology within digital narrative. The scenes incorporate the artist’s own body scans, virtual self-portraits, and a colossal avatar, transforming the physical body into a series of digitised representations of the self while exposing the constructed nature of selfhood.

Through these virtual bodies and digital environments, the work articulates the complexity of the self-structure within the unconscious and the fractures embedded in perception, creating a critical space between simulation and identity.

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By bringing digital virtuality into dialogue with self-fictionality, the work proposes that the “I” is not an unquestionable or transparent experience, but is closely bound to the misrecognition of the ideal-I. Through a reflection on the inability to locate or authenticate the “self” within language, the work further exposes the illusion of an autonomous and self-contained subject, revealing the inseparability of the self from the Big Other.

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↪︎I↩︎ (Within Web of Mask) unfolds as a process of experience, exploration, and discovery, creating an imaginative experimental field at the shifting boundary between the virtual and the real. It challenges the stability of individual cognition while opening up possibilities for critique within systems of simulation, identity, and self-perception.

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This work was commissioned by Aotearoa Digital Arts Network with support from Creative New Zealand.