Hyperrhiz 27

It Keeps Seeing You

Eva Davidova

Citation: Davidova, Eva. “It Keeps Seeing You.” Hyperrhiz: New Media Cultures, no. 27, 2024. doi:10.20415/hyp/027.a09

Abstract: In It Keeps Seeing You, red and black interlinked virtual scenes are composed from drawings acting as portals, photographs and 3D scans by Eva Davidova. Inspired by a poem by Zhivka Baltadzhieva, and sound by Matthew D. Gantt.

Keywords: crossing, unconscious, dance, movement, void, expression.

View Project: It Keeps Seeing You

Instructions for navigation: best viewed on desktop, using Chrome browser. Use the WASD keys to navigate, and the mouse to point direction/look around. Go through the Evian bottle in the pink woman drawing to land in the next scene.

Artist Statement

EVA DAVIDOVA is interested in the technological subconscious, and uses movement, disorientation and myth to immerse the viewer in dreamlike playgrounds. The issues of her work—cruelty, ecological disaster and manipulation of information emerge as paradoxes rather than assumptions, in an almost fairy-tale fashion. Between miss-information, desire, and a tangible possibility (no mater how remote), something grows and sinks into reality.

In a 100000 million years,
winnowed by Einstein's cosmological constant
(E = mc2) the visible universe
will have disappeared into the reddened light.
Everything will be beyond the horizon of its gaze
and the grip of its heat. Only my being
will keep seeing you. It keeps seeing you. It evoques you.
It hugs you. You exist.
You are reality. Birds sing to you in the small garden.
I hear your steps cross the dawns of uncountable
dimensions. And, suddenly,
I feel heat.

From before the Big Bang.

Poem by Zhivka Baltadzhieva, translated from Spanish by Daniel Rabal Davidov.

Zhivka Baltadzhieva is a remarkable Spanish/ Bulgarian poet, and my mother. This poem was given to me for an artist book. I imagine things through time and spaces (albeit virtual), hard to corral on a page, so perhaps my scene-jumping work for Blanket Forts and Other Assemblages is Chapter One for this artist book.

Sound by Matthew D. Gantt
Dancers/ performers: MX Oops, Vinson Fraley, Daveed Baptiste
All drawings by Eva Davidova

Screenshots