8 FEBRUARY 2018

A portrait of the artist’s studio – in virtual reality Gabrielle Schwarz

I Came And Went As A Ghost Hand (Cycle 2) (2015), Rachel Rossin. Installation view, Zieher Smith & Horton, New York, 2015. Courtesy Zabludowicz Collection, London

The building that houses the Zabludowicz Collection in north London is a local heritage landmark: a Grade II-listed 19th-century Methodist chapel in the neoclassical style, its façade complete with Corinthian columns, carved wreath-adorned pediment, tall round-arched entrance and stained glass windows. Inside, however, the focus is very much on the present – and the future. This January, the centre for contemporary art opened the first dedicated space in the UK for exhibiting works made using virtual reality (VR) technology. Located at the back of the building, on its upper level, the 360: VR Room is just that – a tiny room. The only object inside is a VR headset, its cord dangling from the ceiling. The room’s other notable feature is a mosaic of triangular prisms, made out of black foam, that lines its four walls: the vestiges of an installation by Haroon Mirza for his recent exhibition, designed to create an ‘anechoic chamber’ that shuts out all sound and light (and potentially triggers a hallucinatory state for the sensory-deprived visitor). It’s a fitting environment for an experience intended to transport its users somewhere else entirely, to a different – virtual – reality. The artwork chosen to inaugurate the space is a piece from the Zabludowicz Collection (there are, at the most recent count, seven VR works in the collection) by American artist Rachel Rossin. The work, titled I Came and

Went as a Ghost Hand (Cycle 2), was made in 2015 during Rossin’s fellowship in virtual reality research and development at the New Museum in New York. Donning the VR headset, viewers find themselves in a strange world that is impossible to mistake for the real. A pale yellow background, stretching in all directions, provides the depthless surface for a constantly moving arrangement of multi-coloured forms, ranging from the clearly identifiable (a staircase, a doorway, a female figure sitting cross-legged, a crawling outline of a hand) to pixellated abstractions. Turning their head or taking a step forward, the viewer can explore the space – but, like a ghost, will find it impossible to make any contact with their surroundings: effortlessly penetrating brick walls; unidentified flying objects soaring as if right through them. (Until, that is, they step a little too far and end up gently colliding with the thankfully soft edges of the foam-lined chamber.) Over time, a clearer sense of location emerges in this VR world. Rossin has created a modern-day portrait of the artist’s studio. A work table, stacked canvases, the artist at her easel (and laptop): these are all objects and scenes captured using 3D scans in her own studio space in New York, where Rossin makes both her digital works and oil paintings on canvas. The fragmented, at times abstract, nature of the VR rendering is no accident: Rossin has purposefully taken the scans of her studio and altered them, pulled them apart. This is because, as is perhaps the case for any good artist, Rossin’s use of VR technology is driven by a fascination with and desire to explore the medium itself – to test its limits and potentials, to find its capacities for communicating ideas and experiences through its specific mode of representation. For Rossin, ‘inevitably it’s a metaphor for entropy’, the process by which digital data is compressed, distorted or lost over time holding up a mirror to the very nature of representation as loss, as the death of the real. There are, of course, fundamental differences between the immaterial, insulated nature of VR experiences and the way we encounter physical objects, whether paintings, sculptures, or moving-image works viewed on a monitor or projected onto a wall. But some of these differences, such as the fact that currently no more than one user can occupy and interact with the VR world at a time, may not exist for much longer. This is just one example of the rapid pace of technological advances in the field of VR, in which a work from 2015 could soon be considered archaic. And it’s why the Zabludowicz Collection’s current plans, not just to exhibit VR works from their collection but also to collaborate with other institutions such as the New Museum on conferences and the commissioning of new works, are to be welcomed. As artists continue to find interesting ways to make, break and expand the possibilities of virtual reality worlds, so too should institutions remain engaged with the collection, conservation and display of the technology. ‘360: Rachel Rossin’ is at the Zabludowicz Collection, London, until 18 March.

NOVEMBER 2017

Rachel Rossin, The Sky Is a Gap, 2017, mixed media with VR video (color, sound, indefinite duration).

MY WORKS in virtual reality are often crudely sentient—they have an awareness of the viewer. Most recently,

I have created installations that interpolate the audience’s passage through the gallery into the VR

environment’s timescale; the behavior, physics, and light of both physical and virtual spaces are enmeshed. In

Sky Is a Gap, 2017, the scene is a slowly intensifying disaster—a Zabriskie Point–like explosion of a building.

Yet the event progresses only in accordance with the viewer’s physical location: Her movements through

space, tracked by motion sensors, “scrub” the sequence, causing it to unfold at normal speed, sped up, or in

reverse. The viewer drives the disaster with her body. Time, here, happens in 3-D.

Rachel Rossin is a New York-based artist.

ART & DESIGN

Virtual Reality Has Arrived in the Art World. Now What? By JASON FARAGO FEB. 3, 2017

A still from Rachel Rossin’s “Man Mask.” New Museum

When the world outside looks frightful, you might be tempted to put on the blinders […] Last month, the New Museum, in partnership with its new media arm, Rhizome, opened an exhibition of six newly commissioned digital artworks, to be viewed wherever you like, on an Android or iOS device, at no cost. The works in this exhibition, “First Look: Artists’ VR,” all make use of animation — far cheaper than filmed virtual reality, which requires 360-degree camera rigs — and all employ a more or less surreal vocabulary: Objects float in space, spaces collapse into one another […]

The most intriguing work in “First Look” comes from Rachel Rossin, an artist who oscillates between painting and virtual reality projects. Her work “Man Mask” plops you in a hazily defined, whited-out world, derived from scenes from the video game “Call of Duty” — and she has distorted the game’s soldiers and mercenaries into translucent shades while a woman’s voice recites an EST-style mantra of “happiness, peace and cheerfulness.”

Ms. Rossin’s obscure figures and cynical voice-overs find an echo in “Transdimensional Serpent,” by the virtual reality veteran Jon Rafman, which places you amid white humanoids, satyrs and snakes in an empty space, a forest, and a ruined interior […]

What works for video game designers may be less applicable for fine artists, for whom the creation of images is supposed to be a means to something larger, and not an end in itself. That was the great lesson of modernism: Art is more than mere illusion, and it gains further meaning by pushing media to the limits of their capabilities. Virtual reality, by contrast, is a medium without limits — a medium that tries to parallel life itself. The wonder I felt when I first put on an Oculus Rift, and lost myself in Mr. Steegman Mangrané’s rain forest or Ms. Rossin’s floating world, is undeniable. Now the challenge is to put virtual reality in the service of something more complex, for it would be a pity if wonder was all we got.

A version of this article appears in print on February 5, 2017, on Page AR21 of the New York edition with the headline: Plunging Into Artists’ Twilight Zones.

Sundance Interview: Rachel Rossin

By Nick Pinkerton on March 3, 2017

“The concept of entropy is central to Rossin’s body of work, including The Sky is a Gap, whose stated inspiration, immediately decipherable in the wall wrap of the space in the main ‘VR Palace’ showcase, is the series of slow-motion demolitions of consumer goods that caps Michelangelo Antonioni’s Zabriskie Point,” Nick Pinkerton writes in his Inside Stories article in our March/April 2017 issue. Pinkerton spoke with Rossin at Sundance for Film Comment.

Installation view of The Sky is a Gap

The stated launching point for the piece is the climax of Zabriskie Point. What was your first encounter with the film?

Zabriskie Point and Blow-Up are just sort of fixtures in the film and art world, sort of the community that I’m in. It’s just something that’s canonized already, you know? Whatever Zabriskie Point is as a film is secondary to it being canonized already… So I’ve been aware of the film for a really long time, but I’d never really done a piece about it. But I came across the end sequence again, probably last year, right around the time when the political climate started getting really scary, and I rewatched the film, and I was like, “Oh my God, you can just see what he was intending to do, and then what actually came out of it is really interesting.” I was working on the script for this piece like a year ago, and I knew that I wanted to move space and time, I wanted to move time and space. I was working on what would be the content of that process, what would be the content of that script. I had figured out that I wanted to do that, but I hadn’t figured out what the content was. And I came across that ending sequence of Zabriskie Point, and rewatched the film, and realized how important the film could be to the content of this sort of thought experiment, and how that relates to Schrödinger’s equation, those types of thought experiments. And just how there are these parallels between the counterculture movements in that time period and now, both aesthetically and politically.

When people talk about the finale of Zabriskie Point it’s very often talked about as an allegory for American wastefulness, but it’s also very tied into the Cold War, and this sort of A-bomb aesthetic. Not that the two are mutually exclusive from one another—nuclear proliferation is waste. So why did this imagery seem like it was something you needed to dig into now?

I think what I find so poignant about that finale is what he was working on within it. It was all shot in this way, using the telephoto lens, that you can really… You could interpret it as having a certain cynicism, because obviously you’re blowing up a bunch of things, you’re destroying a bunch of things. But it also feels very loving, and obviously it’s very beautiful. What I found interesting was that you can do both, you know? You can hold things close to you, but you can also watch them being dissolved. That’s when I was completely convinced, when I located this feeling of things being very precious just as they’re vaporized.

We’re in a time in history where we just keep hearing about how unprecedented everything is, but it’s very much like what was happening in the late 1960s and early 1970s in a way that… This is kind of the closest thing we have to this. So you have this incredibly cathartic, chaotic ending to a movie that is very curiously conceived, it feels sort of confused… Its heart is so good, but it itself is confused. So that does feel really appropriate for a lot of aspirational countercultural movements which, for better or for worse, are confronted with the worst things and then… It’s not like they’re impotent or anything like that, but like, Occupy Wall Street is a good example. They end up being primal screams, over and over again. But it’s interesting that you have that in common with what was happening then, which was just complete chaos and very confusing. And all we have to do is take these things that we adore or act as time capsules of the period that we’re in and just completely obliterate them. It’s not about nihilism; I think that’s very important. I would argue against Antonioni’s end being nihilistic. I think it’s anything but. It’s about levels of escapism, levels of intimacy, and trying to figure out what defines you in moments of chaos, and how these elements collide… And it’s very much a time capsule, too.

I wonder if you could talk a little bit about the process of collating and curating the objects that fill up the different stages or worlds in your piece. I had a fairly quick walk-through which perhaps wasn’t time enough for me to process what the organizing concept was that was bringing together these various disparate objects. What was your organizing principle?

Some of those are just recreations of my studio, my home and studio life in the present… It’s all just things that felt of this time, and sometimes things of this time obviously bring in things from the past. There’s a kind of VR headset at almost every level. The Avatar movie shows up a few different times, there’s the books… It’s really just things that I felt were important, or important through their lack of importance. They’re all intentional. There’s nothing there that’s not supposed to be there. Sometimes things are important by their very ubiquity. There’s things like birthday cards, there’s that Ram Dass book, which I think is very funny, I’ve been seeing it around a lot, just like on people’s coffee tables. There’s The Gay Science by Nietzsche, which is filled with its own paradoxes.

The Sky is a Gap

Would it be safe to say that even if they’re not all objects or things that you define as personally meaningful, that somehow there is an autobiography or something like that in the objects?

Yeah, definitely. That’s definitely what they are.

I wonder, being somebody who has absolutely no grasp on what the actual nuts and bolts of putting something like this together is, could you describe a little what the actual creation of the piece entailed in layman’s terms?

The approach is more like how you’d approach designing a video game. So what that means is first figuring out how to… The script behind the images is pretty simple. I’m trying to figure out how to move space and time, and so that just meant having conversations with other programmers. Just workshopping it. And then once the main logic was done, once that part of the script was done, from there it was just creating the assets. The assets meaning the objects and the animations that go with them. So the explosions are all done by simulations. We’re using the same software that’s used in any CG movie that’s made now. We’re using the same logic, the same physics systems. So using software for movies—sometimes it’s used in video games, but usually it’s used for movies, like big explosions—and using that, recording the data, and then bringing it into a video game engine, and then putting the logic on top of the simulations. So it’s the same way you’d do it for bringing something like that into a film, the difference being that time here isn’t 2D, time is 3D, and the logic is interactive. Which is really what it is—it’s like you’re scrubbing time forwards and backwards with your body. People in film intuitively understand what that means, especially editors, if you’re scrubbing time forwards and backwards, the difference being we think of time as a 2D thing—which I think is even more interesting—but we think of time as a 2D thing instead of a 3D thing. Obviously time is a 3D thing.

And there are these little pockets of sound that are sort of Easter egged around the space, and it’s very interesting. The way I described it to people is that you feel like your body is a stylus on a record player or something, where you’re kind of contorting yourself in order to get these cryptic messages which are always just on the cusp of audibility, these little broken phrases which almost reminded me in a weird way of Ed Atkins’s work.

Oh yeah. Of course, I like his work..

The Sky is a Gap

These cryptic bits of phrasing…

Yeah, that was an interesting thing because it’s so… Just like time is 3D, sound is 3D in the space as well. If you’re able to move 3D sound as well as space—that was an interesting and more complex thing to figure out. Because how do you build the logic for that? In the piece that I’m making now that has more space, I explore that some

more. You could find the way to get that loop of little sound pieces to play in sequence, but because the sound was traveling in the opposite direction, you’d have to walk backwards while moving at the same speed that the object is moving. That’s an interesting thing to give to people. How you can trick the system into playing it at one to one, and how challenging do you make that [for the viewer]? So my voice is in it, and then voices of people that I love are in there, there’s like the “You’ve got mail!” from AOL in there, political leaders. It’s just sounds that are autobiographical. Sounds, and objects, and people.

I felt like the piece was very much an outlier among the works at the VR Palace. A lot of the work seemed to be very dedicated to trying to implement storytelling technique through VR, and it seems that there’s an ongoing fumbling to figure out what preexisting art form this technology has the most affinity to, and what it can draw from the most, be it immersive theater, or installation art, or narrative cinema, or experimental cinema. And obviously you’re drawing on a certain cinematic precedent, but how are you thinking about the manner in which this is or is not like a preexisting medium?

I find a lot of that discourse to be very… Not only does it feel oppressive and boring but it’s also… There are all these rules about what we’re doing, which I think is a terrible thing. This is a brand-new medium. Well, the medium has been around, obviously, for a very long time, but it’s actually feasible to make things for the medium now, so it’s brand-new according to that. So a brand-new medium, and not even a year goes by with people working in it in large numbers and I’m coming across people telling me what the rules are for it. I find that absolutely to be totally wrongheaded. I still keep seeing that. It’s exactly what you’re saying. I think it’s interesting that people are trying to squeeze what they already know into this new medium, and adopting stuff from other mediums, into something which is completely different in the way that it can function, and just logically, how it is. I think maybe it’s also that there’s not a lot of people that make films and also make video games, and I think that virtual reality is going to bring more of that to the table, both of those skill sets. A lot of good virtual reality would be… a lot of films that could exist in virtual reality would actually be made more like cut-scenes in a video game or something, like interactive cut-scenes. Because I come from a programming background, I think maybe I have an advantage. I wasn’t trying to make films for VR. I’m just trying to make a good art piece, something that could exist in 360.

I wonder if you could talk a little bit about your background in both art and programming.

I went to Florida State. I studied film for a bit there, but mostly art.

And in your gallery exhibitions you’ve combined plastic, physical, IRL artworks—that is, paintings—and VR, had both coexisting in one and the same show.

I did a show a year ago called Lossy which brought together virtual reality and painting, oil painting. “Lossy” is a term that’s used to talk about image compression and data compression. There’s really two types of compression, lossless and lossy. A lossless codec stays perfect forever. And lossy, every time you change it, every time you resize it, it’s like it has entropy sort of built into it, entropy exists in order to save space. So that was an interesting idea of bringing it into the relationship, looking at how virtual reality exists through constant referencing of the physical world. Obviously it references the physical world because it comes from the physical world, but it’s talking about how to make virtual realities from things from the physical world, and then bringing those things from the physical world, meaning the paintings, back into the virtual reality. There’s an interesting thing to explore. So that

was the first time I wanted to do that. And that just felt very natural to me, because it felt like that’s what I’ve been trying to do, even when I was growing up. The first time I started using a computer I was six, and I started learning programming when I was eight so… This felt like something I never really got to put into a physical space, and when I did, it just felt very true. Like almost similar to cinema verité. This feels like I’m trying to do something that I have talked about.

The Sky is a Gap

You use a word in talking about the show Lossy which I think is interesting to think about in terms of The Sky Is a Gap, which is “entropy.” It seems like, maybe it’s a stretch, but there’s a kind of through-line between these two pieces of work. Certainly with regards to the imagery that exists in The Sky Is a Gap, which is literally things falling apart, things coming to pieces.

Yes. Robert Smithson wrote an essay called Entropy and the New Monuments. I was reading that when I was working on both of these pieces, actually, and it’s one of the things that I go back to. It just contextualizes the relationship we have with entropy in a beautiful way. I think that’s one of the through-lines for my work. I keep coming home to it. I think that’s appropriate for both of those works. I think it’s almost unconscious, the influence.

In talking about Dan Flavin’s work, Smithson says that his work is “A part of time rather than space,” which I thought very interesting when thinking about The Sky Is a Gap, which is very centrally concerned with that interrelation.

Yeah. “Time becomes a place minus motion.” Yeah, that’s actually so beautiful because you’re in this moment… I went and saw the Dan Flavin installation in Houston, the last thing he did. These pieces, these columns of light, are flanking the gallery, it’s almost like an homage to two-point perspective, these columns of light are shooting into the distance. All I wanted to do was run past them, like forwards and backwards, so I was like running from one side of the gallery to the next. The space was completely empty. I just wanted to figure out how he found a way to space these columns in a different relationship to one another. When I first started working on this piece, what I wanted was to be able to use something on the scale of, like, a football field. I wanted one-to-one with space and time, only moving extremely fast when you’re running it at that speed. Unconsciously, that must have been in there, that experience of wanting to activate Dan Flavin’s work.

I’ve seen you use the phrase “entropic moderator” before, which I like very much. I wonder if you could expand on what that means?

Okay, I’ll try! I think that’s what our… your role as a human being is that. And I think that the core of my favorite experiences have that as their tether to reality. It’s what we’re doing every day. When we’re experiencing… I’ll get too far out, maybe, if I go on. I think if I say too much, I’ll kill it.

It’s interesting that you say it’s at the core of your favorite experiences because generally, entropy is thought of as kind of tied to pessimism. It’s very Henry Adams, very things fall apart. You seem to be positing it as something… else.

Yeah, I know. That’s like the core sentiment, the reason that things are sweet is because they end. Finding the sweetness is figuring out how to negotiate, or moderate, how long you can stretch out the inevitable.

Nick Pinkerton is a regular contributor to Film Comment and a member of the New York Film Critics Circle.

FORBES 30 UNDER 30: ART & STYLE Edited by Susan Adams, Keren Blankfeld, Michael Solomon and Glenda Toma

Rachel Rossin Artist Age 29 Residence New York, NY Education Bachelor of Arts / Science, Florida State University Rossin is both a painter and virtual reality artist. In one piece, she explored what is lost in translation between physical and virtual spaces, scanning bits of her paintings and photos she took in her studio and apartment, and using them to make short videos experienced through an Oculus Rift headset in a gallery hung with her work. She's shown in solo exhibitions in New York, and in museums in Basel, Riga, Istanbul and Helsinki. She's also a fellow at New Inc., a cultural incubator founded by the New Museum in New York.

THE FIVE RISING ARTISTS YOU MUST KNOW IN 2016 From Rachel Rossin to Emily Mae Smith, this handful of up and coming talents are set on reshaping our view of reality.

by Fan Zhong, Andrew Russeth, Kevin McGarry and Jenny Comita

November 2, 2016 9:00 am

As always, W's annual Art Issue has one eye on the landscape of contemporary art today, and one on its promising future. Here, we have selected five artists who are already making work that will matter for years to come.

Rachel Rossin’s Abandoned Pool, 2016; Rossin, in her studio. Abandoned Pool: Courtesy of ZieherSmith, New York; Rossin: Mark Hartman.

Rachel Rossin Still in their beta stages, virtual reality headsets have already become the art world’s accessory du jour, a must for any forward-looking biennial. Although the artist Rachel Rossin, 29, is known for her innovative VR installations, she admits that the fashionable new medium is still in a nascent stage. “And the headsets are ugly,” she adds. Rossin should know: She is designing what she hopes will be a more aesthetically pleasing headset, complete with a mirrored surface. In two shows last year at Signal gallery, in Brooklyn, and ZieherSmith, in Manhattan, Rossin bridged the gap between the white cube and the floating, limitless digital world she had devised by showing sculptures and semi-abstract paintings that represented the imaginary world inside the headset. “I feel uncomfortable with my work being called ‘surrealism,’ ” Rossin says, after some critics referred to her pieces as Dalí-esque. Still, she admits that outside of an art-historical context, that is exactly what VR is: surreal. (Just think of the times you’ve witnessed someone stumbling about an empty gallery, hooked up to a long wire, like some blindfolded marionette.) “Right now I’m using sculpture and painting to address the gradient between the virtual and the real. But I have other things in progress that take that even further,” she hints. “It’s clunky, but eventually VR will be a medium in the canon.” — Fan Zhong

Rachel Rossin featured in “The New Guard: 30 Young Artists to Watch”

The Top Emerging Artists of 2016 Artsy Editorial Among the more pervasive art-world narratives of 2016 was the downturn in the market for works by emerging artists. Market contractions may have limited the sheer number of new names bubbling up to surface this year in comparison to the last few. But this tempered pace also allowed for greater attention to be placed on the emerging artists of true quality and depth who gained traction in 2016—and it allowed a number of artists who have been working actively and slowly gaining recognition over several years to step up and strongly stake their claim as among those defining contemporary art today. Surveying this landscape, Artsy’s editors consulted a number of data sources, including UBS’s art news app Planet Art, and the insight of influential individuals to see who among these new and newly essential names proved a cut above the rest. Here, in no particular order, are the top emerging artists of this year.

Rachel Rossin B. 1987, WEST PALM BEACH, FLORIDA LIVES AND WORKS IN BROOKLYN, NEW YORK Rossin began experimenting with computer code at the tender age of age eight. And, recently, she has been hailed as one of the pioneers of the burgeoning artistic medium of virtual reality. The New York-based artist skillfully manipulates digital technology to create immersive environments where one might fall through the center of the world as gravity dissipates or drift through the artist’s digitally distorted home and studio like a ghost—all seen through the Oculus Rift headset, which she’s tinkered with since receiving a developer prototype before its official launch in spring 2016. Rossin has been increasingly gaining traction following two well-received New York solo shows in 2015—“n=7 / The Wake in Heat of Collapse” at SIGNAL and “Lossy” at ZieherSmith—both of which featured virtual reality-based works, often in conversation with her paintings and sculptures. She was also selected as the New Museum’s first-ever virtual reality fellow, a program she wrapped up in 2016 under the purview of the museum’s incubator NEW INC. “She’s one of those rare artists who is seemingly devoid of ego and pretension, who exudes genuine and uninhibited curiosity, and radiates warmth and light,” says Julia Kaganskiy, director of NEW INC. “I think this may be the reason why she’s able to move between worlds, contexts, and media so deftly, alternating between wielding a paintbrush or VR headset, and offering subtle but poignant images and observations that illuminate and inspire both vantage points.” Rossin’s work has continued to captivate audiences at the 2016 editions of SPRING/BREAK Art Show, NADA New York, UNTITLED, Miami Beach, and Seattle Art Fair; and during Art Basel in Miami Beach week, fair-goers visiting the brand new Faena Art Dome experienced her project commissioned by Artsy, using 360° projection to bring virtual reality out of the headset.

In Virtual Reality, Women Run the World A new generation of female artists is making VR the most diverse corner of the male-dominated tech space. BY DAYNA EVANS

[…]Here are a small handful of the women pushing VR forward.

Rachel Rossin, the Visual Artist

Rachel Rossin’s Brooklyn studio exists in the physical world, but also

as a fully immersive VR experience. Her debut as a virtual-reality

painter came with her installation Lossy, in which viewers put on a

Rift headset and walk through a three-dimensional space Rossin built

by scanning parts of her paintings. Upon taking off the mask, the viewer is confronted with Rossin’s IRL paintings,

which serve as a gentle landing back into the real world.

Rossin, now a fellow at the New Museum incubator alongside Milica Zec, was interested in both art and computers

from the time she was a kid. “When I was really young, I started programming and hacking video games and putting

computers together. I used a boy’s avatar and name to avoid getting hassled,” she says. “I couldn’t find girls into the

same things on the internet and I found that if I didn’t use a boy’s identity, I’d get a lot of pictures of grown-ups’

penises.” She began experimenting with combining programming and visual art in college, and she found it took a lot

of trial and error to get the exact blend she wanted.

“I remember seeing those big million-dollar systems at the mall, but they were just theme-park rides,” she says. “I was

like, ‘Oh yeah, fuck yeah, let’s do this.’ But it obviously wasn't attainable at the time. Smartphone technology is the

reason we have VR today.”

One of Rossin’s upcoming projects allows the viewer to move time forward with space. As the viewer walks through a

room, an explosion erupts, and pieces of the room start to move around. The participant must continue walking

forward to see the explosion to its end, thus time moving forward as she walks. “It’s a little bit of an arms race because

there’s not really anything in canon,” Rossin says about the VR landscape. “That’s super interesting and really exciting.

We spend so much time on screens and there’s this idea that they are so separate. But we’re dealing with a gradient of

virtual reality already. The only difference now is that computers aren’t windows, they’re spaces.” […]

ART & DESIGN

At Seattle Art Fair, the Interaction Between Technology and Modern Life By KIRK JOHNSON AUG. 7, 2016

Visitors at the Seattle Art Fair explore an exhibit by Rachel Rossin that includes paintings and virtual reality goggles. Credit Evan McGlinn for The New York Times A version of this review appears in print on August 8, 2016, on page C1 of the New York edition with the headline: An Art Fair Where Tech Intersects With Modern Life.

ART & DESIGN

In Rachel Rossin’s ‘Lossy,’ the Virtual Reality of Living in a Painting

By MARTHA SCHWENDENER NOV. 5, 2015

Rachel Rossin’s “Self Portrait” at Zieher Smith & Horton.

Virtual reality is once again being acclaimed as the next big thing, driven this time by smartphone technology and Facebook’s acquisition of Oculus Rift last year. But virtual reality has been on the rise among artists for a couple of years: Jon Rafman, Daniel Steegmann Mangrané and Joe Fig have all harnessed it. In January Rachel Rossin hosted a one-night event at Signal in Bushwick that featured one of her virtual reality projects, and now she is showing another such piece along with her near abstract paintings. To create this work, Ms. Rossin scanned bits of her paintings and images photographed in her studio and apartment and created a two-and-a-half minute video that you experience by donning a Rift headset. Unlike the seamless environment you generally see in video games, Ms. Rossin’s includes lots of white space; objects and fragmented forms float within it, occasionally disintegrating — hence the “lossy” in the exhibition’s title, a word that suggests entropy in the

coding of digital images or sound) on what feels like near impact with your eye. Where virtual reality has been criticized for leaving you disoriented or queasy, isolating the eye in this manner simulates the fantasy of living inside a painting or having painterly images converge with your retina. The effect is destabilizing and exhilarating. Neither Ms. Rossin’s paintings nor the virtual reality piece, however, feel like fully realized masterpieces. “Digital painting” has always seemed like an oxymoron: The tactility of painting, and its static depiction or recording of movement, are part of the medium’s appeal. But Ms. Rossin has achieved something, forging a connection between abstract painting and augmented perception that opens up a fourth dimension that existed only in theory for earlier painters.

Rachel Rossin’s “Mirror Milk.”

______ Rachel Rossin ‘Lossy’

Zieher Smith & Horton

516 West 20th Street, Chelsea

Through Nov. 14

A version of this review appears in print on November 6, 2015, on page C31 of the New York edition.

Rachel Rossin ZIEHER SMITH & HORTON

Rachel Rossin, After GTA V, 2015, oil on canvas, 60 × 78".

Themes from Lewis Carroll’s Through the Looking Glass loom large throughout William Gibson’s 2003 novel Pattern Recognition, which characterizes an American protagonist’s trip to the UK as a disorienting encounter with a “mirror-world.” But while Carroll framed his chiral universe as the product of minds and dreams, Gibson found alterity in machines and devices. Both these modes seemed alive in “Lossy,” Rachel Rossin’s recent solo show, whose nine paintings and a piece experienced via an Oculus Rift virtual-reality headset—titled I Came and Went as a Ghost Hand, 2015—bore unmistakeable traces of Carroll’s dark yet innocent whimsy as well as Gibson’s tech-saturated neurasthenia.

Exhibiting an Oculus Rift work is a risky business. It’s apt to monopolize the attention of novelty seekers while causing skeptics—those who can’t forgive the burgeoning medium for its rough edges and unresolved questions—to shuffle quickly on by. (One such unresolved question: Should an Oculus Rift headset be exhibited on a pedestal?) In “Lossy,” these risks yielded rewards when the device’s limitations became a foil to painting’s by-now-familiar constraints. There’s nothing that quite emphasizes the static materiality of paint like a virtual world that offers zero physical resistance as viewers move specter-like through fragmented forms. In I Came and Went as a Ghost Hand, that virtual world lay somewhere between The Cabinet of Dr. Caligari and The Martha Stewart Show: Its two-and-a-half-minute looped mix of landscape and domestic space included canned goods in a fridge door overhead, a multicolored bed seemingly underfoot, and walls and vases and shrubbery drifting in place with the languor of inner tubes on a pool.

Overall, Rossin’s process is a sort of exquisite corpse played out between human and machine: To create her canvases, she scanned various kinds of images and digitally manipulated them, then painted the results as observed from a computer screen. These image deformations were more than just your garden-variety Photoshop play: For the piece After GTA V, 2015, the artist began with the image of a sunset fromGrand Theft Auto V (2013), and then crumpled and wadded it up, a bit like Richard Tuttle might crumple a canvas—the difference being that Rossin did so in simulated 3-D space, using photogrammetry software (which assigns and records distances between various coordinates of an image), and then translated the on-screen results back into an oil on canvas.

A similar process led to the genesis of Mirror Milk, 2015, which at first seems to depict a roughly painted kitten through a filter of soft tropicalia. The feline visage within, as it turns out, is a scanned image of a drawing Rossin made as a child. (According to Rossin, the work’s title nods to Carroll’s Alice asking her pet cat about “looking-glass milk”; to some Gibson fans, the title also inevitably evokes the “mirror-world milk” described in Pattern Recognition.) Meanwhile, the seed image of Self Portrait, 2015, was just that—an image of the artist, around which she digitally wrapped a scanned JPEG of a painting from her previous show. After subjecting the already warped images to a software simulation of gravitational forces, she then rendered the outcome as a painting; the result looks like a melting rainbow-sherbet bust of Baphomet.

The abstract imagery in Rossin’s compositions seemingly comes from two places: from her own expressionist intuition and from rule-based, algorithm-driven filters of her image-editing software. (If the former inherits something of Carroll’s world, produced via the unconscious, the latter inhabits the spirit of Gibson’s, constituted via technology.) The show’s fireworks happened at the intersection of these two modes, where the optical gobbledygook generated by a computer was rendered by hand as oils on canvas, and framed in the evolving tradition of abstract painting. In “Lossy,” there was most certainly a kid hacker flexing her muscles. But the show revealed another image of Rossin as well: a painter who, for the moment, has found a very good vantage point from which to survey the chaos of a shifting media landscape.

—Dawn Chan

Tripping Through Digital Landscapes in Virtual Reality and on Canvas

by Jeffrey Grunthaner on November 11, 2015

Installation view, Rachel Rossin, ‘Lossy’ at Zieher Smith & Horton

The works in Rachel Rossin’s show at Zieher Smith & Horton unfold sequentially, like the illustrations of an idea that is carefully trying to prove itself. The exhibition’s theme is loss, or, per the show’s title, Lossy, a term describing the loss of visual detail that results from data compression.

Rossin has created a kind of alternate reality out of the entropy to which information is exposed. Her collage-like painting “5_Bulls” (2015), for instance, depicts a copied-and-pasted utopia of pixilated figures that seem drawn from comic books. And her homage to the more contemplative aspects of Grand Theft Auto, “After GTA V” (2015), bears witness to a kind of scrap paper digitality, capturing the immateriality of images in a pictorial webbing reminiscent of the more tangible and print-based technique of collage. Combining the integrative culture of the digital and the more analytic culture of print, “After GTA V” liquefies the compartmentalization of contemporary life. It depicts, in glowing twilight hues, the

Rachel Rossin, “5_Bulls” (2015)

oil on canvas, 68 x 37 inches

incompleteness of a world where interactive media totally eclipse lived experience. The Impressionistic brushwork of “GTA V” gives it a gestural presence, evoking the hand-guided movements of game play in a painterly, expressive manner that approaches pictorial realism. Here, however, realism doesn’t relate to anything the eye sees IRL, but to that which we can only see in a mediated way, through a digital scrim. In this respect, “GTA V” encapsulates the methodology Rossin has applied throughout the show. Everywhere in Lossy, immaterial images are rendered as plausible realities.

Rachel Rossin, “After GTA V” (2015), oil on canvas, 60 x 78 inches

Perhaps because they’re oil-on-canvas recreations of digital originals, Rossin’s paintings are much softer, even less elegant, than they might appear as images. Her paintings tend to portray glitch-like figures in settings that combine the utopian spatial possibilities of 3D modeling with allusions to the image saturation of social media. Transferring to the canvas figures that she first renders digitally, it’s as though Rossin has run the visual language of landscape painting and architectural interiors through Google Translate, reconfiguring the resulting poetic babble according to the terms of traditional realist painting.

The wholesale substitution of images for realities forms an especially vital aspect of the exhibition’s virtual reality installation, “I Came And Went As A Ghost Hand” (2015). The work, which reminded me of both Gaspar Noé’s Enter the Void and the Sega Saturn game NiGHTS into Dreams, is uncanny in the way it denies any visual evidence of the body. Wearing a prototype version of Oculus Rift glasses, you’re thrown headlong into the polygonal surfaces of walls, or made to float spectrally over some domestic scene reproduced in granular yet amazingly lifelike detail. This hyper-visual work deprives you of any directional control. For the most part, you float; and while you’re able to look at and around objects — as you would in any three-dimensional environment — you’re shunted in a disembodied, ghost-like manner through the virtually constructed world, as though tethered to a bungee cord pulling you this way and that.

Still from Rachel Rossin, “I Came And Went As A Ghost Hand” (2015), Virtual reality

The objects populating “I Came And Went As A Ghost Hand” are undeniably sculptural; and the bombed-out architectures suspended throughout its snow globe-like expanse are only enhanced by the pixelation they’ve seemingly undergone in the rendering process. Despite its immersiveness, the virtual reality installation requires a suspension of disbelief; this is what enables art to comment on experience, rather than being an enveloping experience unto itself. Ultimately, “I Came And Went As A Ghost Hand” is a formal commentary on the nature of scale, which is usually determined relative to our bodies, but here has been reconfigured as something warped and unsettling.

Rossin’s work is most powerful when she creates novel environments. The pieces in Lossy portray expansive spaces replete with weird objects in seemingly impossible juxtapositions. Her paintings continue the search for new structures characteristic of Giorgio de Chirico in his metaphysical period and of Yves Tanguy throughout his entire career. What keeps Rossin’s work from becoming Surrealist, though, is its programmatic authorship. The novelty of structure sought out in these works doesn’t have its origins in the unconscious, but in the spatial logic of 3D rendering, glimpsed through a computer screen. This is what makes her paintings fresh. Rather than mimicking the perspectives of film or photography, Rossin recreates the all-encompassing character of media that incorporate both.

VR installation, Rachel Rossin, ‘Lossy’ at Zieher Smith & Horton

Pitting old media against new, measuring their reactivity against one another, the works in Lossy seek to bridge the divide between culture and entertainment. Is it so inconceivable that entertaining works can also be intelligent? Today the digital screen takes up the mantle of TV, which for media theorist Marshall McLuhan was a quintessentially “cool” or interactive medium, requiring the presence of a viewer to be fleshed out with content. The works in this exhibition function similarly. Their allure depends on how well they absorb the viewer while still leaving room for refusal and critique.

5 Must-See Shows in New York: Graham Collins, Rachel Rossin, and More BY SCOTT INDRISEK | OCTOBER 22, 2015

Rachel Rossin at Zieher Smith & Horton, through November 14 The Oculus Rift is having its contemporary art moment: a headset-enabled virtual sculpture was in the New

Museum Triennial (Daniel Steegman Mangrane); Jon Rafman brought one to Miami; Jeremy Coillard

programmed a New Age-inflected experience in the basement of Louis B. James gallery. With “Lossy,” Rossin

adds her own spin to the technology, presenting paintings whose creation is interwoven with Oculus-enabled

virtual realities based on IRL environments (her apartment, her studio). Spend some time wearing the headset,

which takes you through a vertiginous artificial space — the experience is on a roughly two-minute loop, but it

feels infinitely longer, as you’re free to move around any which way you’d like, discovering new elements as you

float up staircases and through walls. The virtual world itself is seen in fragments and shards, as if a legion of

digital termites have gorged on the information architecture. The accompanying paintings feature recognizable

elements — a bull, some flowers — but with perspectives stretched, shadows oddly flung, figures elongated, and

dimensions occasionally flattened.

D av id E bo ny 's T o p 1 0 N ew Yo rk Gal l ery Shows fo r Oc to ber

D a v i d E b o n y , F r i d a y O c t o b e r 2 3 , 2 0 1 5

Rachel Rossin, I Came And Went As A Ghost Hand (virtual real ity st il l ), 2015

Rachel Rossin, at Zieher Smith & Horton, through November 14

The premise for “Lossy," an exhibit ion of recent paintings, and virtual-reality work by Florida-born, New

York-based artist Rachel Rossin, is, as the t it le suggests, loss or depreciation of energy. The term

applies especially to electronic data, and the second law of thermodynamics, signs of entropy. In her

work, Rossin depicts a decaying world, with imploding landscapes, such as the painting Substrate,

decomposing abstracted figures, as in Self Portrait, and melting sti ll l ifes, includingRoses in a Vase.

Rossin's paintings share something with Glenn Brown's particular brand of melancholia. It is an

exquisitely realized vis ion, both forlorn and thri l ling.

The show's centerpiece, I Came And Went As A Ghost Hand, is a dizzying 3D extravaganza accessible

by means of two Oculus Rift headsets, suspended from the ceiling by cables and placed on sculpture

stands. The virtual reality work offers what the show's press release describes as a transmogrified

environment. But it is actually a gorgeous and mesmerizing place of undulating landscapes, and

expansive interior spaces, all digital images based on the artist 's studio, environs, and paintings. It 's

just a 2 ½- minute trip, but it 's hard to pull yourself out of Rossin's dream world. When you do, it 's not a

let-down to re-explore the i llusionistic spaces within the two-dimensional confines of her paintings. As

an experiential endeavor, this exhibit ion represents the most successful merger of painting and virtual

reality I have seen.

Virtual Reality Paintings Destroy Notions of the "Still Life" By Marina Garcia-Vasquez — Nov 5 2015

Much like surrealism was a movement to unlock the potential of the unconscious mind, virtual reality looks to unlock our

conditions from reality. In looking to regard entropy as a form of beauty, the artist Rachel Rossin presents a new body of work

titled Lossy, based on data compressions that degrade over time.

Currently on display at Zieher Smith & Horton, in New York, Rossin’s Lossy paintings and virtual reality simulations created in

game development software reveal the process of loss in the transference of the digital to the physical. This reduction is felt

most particularly when a JPEG or an MP3 file loses its form. Much like Dali’s dripping clocks, gravity is unhinged and so is

time and memory in Rossin’s works.

The beauty is in her ability to capture somewhat recognizable and relatable objects as physical objects, because then the

sublime of lack of perspective in VR charges the experience with nostalgia. Are we entering moments of the future, or

backtracking to adhere to the past?

Perhaps the best example of this is in I Came and Went as a Ghost Hand, a live painting that exists without a beginning or

end. It is a 3D world in a feedback loop. To understand more about the artist’s investigations in creating paintings and VR art

experiences, The Creators Project interviewed Rossin about her compositions and her experience as a virtual reality research

fellow at NEW INC, the New Museum’s incubator for art, design and technology.

The Creators Project: What is your artistic process? Did you encounter the idea of Lossy and then get painting, or

start experimenting with VR technology first?

Rachel Rossin: I started programming and working digitally when I was eight. I was hacking video games and erasing their

architecture, building computers and teaching myself beginning languages. There was a long history with me feeling like the

physical and virtual worlds were very separate entities and pairing them always felt clumsy or forced.

As an adult, I've always been a painter and installation artist and slowly started incorporating new med. Virtual reality came in

during a residency at Borscht in 2014 and I had a VR show I was really happy with at Signal Gallery, but Lossywas the first

show where I dovetailed the virtual with the physical.

Your images are reminiscent of still lifes.

Absolutely. So the process of making these begins in the physical world with photorealistic photogrammetry captures and then

I bring them into the virtual and build 3D simulations and structures with them. Because I'm using game engine software I can

manipulate physics and use reality as a medium. People get to experience this firsthand in the VR piece but I'm translating the

still moments into my paintings.

The subject matter (still lifes) is exactly where you're getting at—it's a still life that I'm decimating, extruding all while

acknowledging the subject matter's history and in the context of a different type of ephemerality. A huge subject matter for still

lifes was the memento mori—so that's where the repeated imagery of fruit, skulls, flowers, etc., comes from in those paintings.

It was all about entropy. I like being able to touch on virtual ephemerality. There's a self-portrait in there too. A 3D scan of my

face using motion capture software with gravity applied to the top of my head so the effect looks like a visual swoon.

How do you decide on your color palette?

I follow my gut. I just like what I like. There's probably all subconscious reasons for this, like the amount of blue I use because I

grew up in flatland Florida where the only terrain is the sky.

What is the relationship between what is on the canvas and what is present in VR?

That's the heart of what Lossy is about—the communication between these two places and where one leaves off the other

begins to talk. I start by capturing the physical and then bring into the virtual and then back out again to the physical as paint

and because I am working in true 3D as the reference point. I can begin to manipulate the image with physics, change

reference points and light. My favorite one to work with right now is gravity and I can't help it.

I have always loved that in video games, dropping away from the world when you walk off the side of a collider—and in video

game language, it's transcendent. This was a major pillar in my show at Signal.

Tell us about your VR fellowship with NEW INC. Are you being hyper productive or slow and focused on new realms?

NEW INC has given me a tremendous amount of support for my work. I always feel slow but when I zoom out it seems like I've

been pretty productive. I've done two solo shows, a panel at MIT, and four separate VR pieces (three built primarily for the

gear and one focused for Oculus) all while during my fellowship there since April. It's nice to have the current show finished to

start some of this other whimsical research I've been wanting to do through NEW INC.

Lossy is on view at Zieher Smith & Horton in New York through November 14.

WEEKEND MISER

Rachel Rossin’s Virtual-Reality Installation in Bushwick By JOSHUA BARONE JANUARY 15, 2015

The Miser, giving in to nostalgia, recently began playing a Nintendo 64 game in which he has 72 hours to defeat a masked menace before the moon falls on a fictional land. But the apocalypse is more like a reset button; “game over” is shorthand for “let’s try that again.” The artist Rachel Rossin played the same video game growing up. In some way, she said, it was in the back of her mind as she created “n=7/The Wake in Heat of Collapse,” an interactive installation that will be open to the public Friday at Signal, a gallery in Bushwick, Brooklyn. If you go, you’ll wear an Oculus Rift headset and immerse yourself in a Dante-esque virtual reality with imagery from video games and other pop culture. You’ll navigate the landscape until the world collapses without warning, and you fall into an entirely new level. And repeat. “It’s a collage — a barrage — of culture,” said Ms. Rossin, 27. She said to expect pop-up ads and images textured with Google’s logo. The mobile payment app Venmo even makes an appearance. “There are a lot of generation-specific in-jokes.” Not all of them, though. The virtual world’s crumbling staircase is covered in text from Susan Sontag’s “Against Interpretation.” Why? Ms. Rossin will leave that up to you. Only three people will be able to play at any given time, so arrive early if you want to guarantee a spot. (Friday at 7 p.m., 260 Johnson Avenue, at Bushwick Place; 347-746-8457, ssiiggnnaall.com.) ______

A version of this article appears in print on January 16, 2015, on page C36 of the New York edition with the headline: Rachel Rossin’s Virtual-Reality Installation