The Third Place (2023) / Maria Josef
“The Third Place” is a 3D computer-animated looped short film. The title of the work references a PlayStation ad from the year 2000, based on the idea that the PlayStation was a gateway from your everyday life and contained a place that was neither work nor home but something entirely different. Here, “The Third Place” is neither physical nor digital; it is a backroom of conscience, a surreal space of emptiness and lack of humanness. It does not contain or represent any specific bodies, and the narrator could be anyone and everyone. References consist of Søren Kierkegaard’s philosophies on being and existentialism, Plato’s cave allegory, Mamoru Oshii’s 1995 “Ghost in the Shell,” and Hideaki Anno’s “Neon Genesis Evangelion” from the same year, Donna Haraway’s “Cyborg Manifesto,” and Lisa Nakamura’s essay “Cybertypes; Race, Ethnicity, and Identity on the Internet”.
Maria Josef (DK/NO)
I work interdisciplinary with digital media, including 3D animation, creative coding, video gaming software, and sculpture, such as 3D print and ceramic. My work often centers around digital realities and how they relate to questions about identity. I am interested in the line between materiality and immateriality and how one affects the other. These might be thoughts in line with the meaning of having a physical body as opposed to existing only digitally or how the representation of identity virtually differs from the one in our offline lives. At the moment, I am particularly concerned with acts of cloning. Reproducing, replicating, and duplicating, and specifically in virtual spaces. What happens with our sense of identity, living in an age where digital reproduction of our bodies is constant?
mariajosef.myportfolio.com