Day Off 1- 12

Jillian Mayer

In her video work, Jillian Mayer presents an absurd-seeming visual statement in which various protagonists act in a familiar world, but whose patterns of movement conflict with our traditional habitus.

Seen more directly, the protagonists of Mayer's online series Day Off play an interactive virtual reality game whose content or goal remains hidden from the observer. They only interact with the real space and thus with the reality of the viewer through their pure physical presence. Their actions are only marginally anchored in the old reality, since their function and work are rooted only in the interactive virtual reality.

Technology determines the perception and movement patterns in whose exaltation the physical world dissolves in its being.

Jillian Mayer does not leave this pseudo-separation in its superficial exactness and determines a deeper and ineradicable connection of the two factualities. She consciously reduces the focus on the body, which is the necessarily binding interface to the analogue world and which, however, will soon be understood as a pure relic of it.

How far this body is alienated, can be read in the reality of the player, whose truth no longer depends on physical presence or existence. This does not mean an antisocial dystopia, because on the contrary, the actors of a digital reality connect intensively via pluralistic interfaces and live these connections as intensively as the future anachronistic habits of a purely analog world.