You are going to take a bath in good luck.

With the project You are going to take a bath in good luck., multi-media artists Tatjana Vall and Justin Urbach encounter transhuman realities with an equally artificial and vulnerable physicality.

Starting from the trend towards self-optimization of the human body in Western society, the artists develop a narrative centered on a sunbed in order to expose questionable values of an outdated consumer behavior.

„The change of values over the past few decades has shown, that the interests of the first world forward-thinking population is shifted towards the ‚nonmaterial‘ and ‚original’. Following this, transhumanistic tendencies that could become more relevant and real in near future could be a sort of isolation due to self optimization, driven by the curiosity to overcome biological and physical barriers.“ Vall explains.

The joint project is a hybrid of a physical exhibition taking place at Digital Art Space in Munich and its digital extension online at the space’s website and the artists’ instagram channels. The physical exhibition on site at the Digital Art Space is composed of an actual open sunbed, flooding the exhibition space with cold blue light, a printout version of the UV map of Tatjana Vall’s animated goat in with textures and three screens presenting each artist’s video works. The works project artifactual components of the theme: Abstract motion sequences, surreal scenes and trans medial translations expand the retro-technofetishist view, crossing it with current transhumanistic currents. Both artists respond to each other in positions that are brought together in a two-channel video which have been available exclusively on view on the art space’s website.

The artists constantly expand the exhibition through short videos and animations on their instagram accounts, that are also linked below. You are going to take a bath in good luck. as a positive affirmation is only one part of Vall’s and Urbach’s titles for the multi-layered project: „Because of the broadness and layered exhibition platforms, we don’t use only this one title. The social media videos are all ’subtitled’ with different fortune cookie quotes. The inspiration for it came because of the odd formulation. For us, this had a soft and relaxing effect somehow. This mood should reflect the solarium light, which is equally strange: neither cold nor warm but very relaxing.“ as Vall clarifies.

Vall and Urbach both study at the Academy of Fine Arts Munich and have collaborated before: Their trans media performance Drop dead faster, which also has been a hybrid of on- and offline presentation, took place in October 2020. The performance with six actors dealt with the expectations of our current first world society and its self reflection and translated the the poem C’mon pigs of western civilizations Eat more grease by Allen Ginsberg from the late 1990s into contemporary context.

„Apart from creating art, new media reflects our expectations and behavior towards the objects and surfaces we interact with.“ Vall explains her approach to new media, continuing that „there will always be the necessity for a translator between new media itself and a human audience.“.