The way that I was making art
before I knew it was art,
it was like making homes.
Just trying to find home.
Florida is already a strange place
filled with a lot of contradictions and strata of chaos.
Growing up, there was a lot of intensity
and my parents were just fully, fully overwhelmed.
So I think it was out of this idea,
escapism does end up being necessary.
It's interesting because I see so much of that in my work still today.
The same things keep coming up.
["Rachel Rossin's Digital Homes"]
I started programming when I was around eight.
I was starting to use command line
and understand that, if I typed "print," then I would print the thing.
Or I was making ASCII art, which means arranging letters in a format
by just hitting the "enter" key a lot.
Just playing around.
But then when Windows 95 came out, I started opening up EXE packages.
So I was seeing the backend.
I was opening video games.
I was opening the games that came loaded, like Solitaire.
I was trying to figure out how to open that
and then would have to try to repair it because it was the family computer.
It's just a lot of breaking things,
which I think is the best way to learn.
--Of course, nothing is working now that you're here.
--I need to calibrate it.
My go-to tool for animation is always motion capture
because I want to be able to see something living behind
something that's typically pretty sterile.
--This thing is fun because it's like...
--You're also just kind of working with the way it breaks.
--So it's like I've rigged this man to live inside my hand.
--So the algorithm is trying to search for a humanoid figure
--using markerless motion capture.
--And instead it has the only thing they can latch onto as limbs:
--my fingers.
When I first started gaming,
I started saving the assets, like the 3D models that I could find.
So I built up a library from when I was quite young [Rachel gaming at age 15]
and recovered a lot of the assets from those hard drives.
["Skinsuits," 2019]
The first avatar that I remember consciously using was a generic male avatar
and it was trying to find a neutrality in the Internet that I was just navigating.
That is what led to "Man Mask."
I was just looking back and thinking about when I was playing Call of Duty, ["Man Mask," 2019]
I took on this male avatar to sort of live inside.
It was just like safety--
you're trying to find some sort of point of neutrality.
There's this virtual avatar
that I've more or less kept in the studio just for myself.
It's this harpy,
which is half human, half bird.
She, for me, represents how I feel very much in two places at once.
She speaks to a reality that most people feel,
which is so much of our emotional and cognitive space lived in virtual spaces.
But still...
being tethered to a "mortal coil."
[ROSSIN] --Have you grabbed this guy?
[ASSISTANT] --Yeah.
[ROSSIN] The installation is titled, "I'm my loving memory."
The work is
eight plexiglass pieces that I formed
and an accompanying AR piece.
First they start as paintings--
digital paintings.
They're sourced from 3D renderings,
spaces that are fully virtual.
Then they're just printed out onto the plexiglass--
just UV printed out.
The way that the UV works is it's embedded inside the plexi,
so that I can heat it enough
and then mold it.
They act so much as these hollow body imprints of myself.
I'm physically using my body to form them.
I think of them as...
as shields.
["I'm my loving memory", 2020–2021]
The way that the work is installed is
it's important that it's shown with its shadow
because the AR piece blends with the shadows
that are made by the plexiglass.
When you walk into the installation, you see the sculptures
and then you see this window that's the AR piece.
Once you ask the AR piece to start,
there's this scene that unfolds in front of you.
For myself, it always comes back to my own embodiment
and how to anchor this very abstract, loose space
in the same dimension that I'm in.
It's very sweet how, in a lot of ways,
the work doesn't change, it just...
looks different.
The heart is still there in a lot of ways.
["everyone's connected"]
--It's okay.