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Claudia Hart


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Inside the Flower Matrix, 2016, rendered screen grabs made inside the Oculus VR experience, lost in the labyrinth Inside the Flower Matrix, 2016, rendered screen grabs made inside the Oculus VR experience, lost in the labyrinth Inside the Flower Matrix, 2016, rendered screen grabs made inside the Oculus VR experience, lost in the labyrinth Inside the Flower Matrix, 2016, rendered screen grabs made inside the Oculus VR experience, lost in the labyrinth Inside the Flower Matrix, 2016, rendered screen grabs made inside the Oculus VR experience, lost in the labyrinth Inside the Flower Matrix, 2016, rendered screen grabs made inside the Oculus VR experience, lost in the labyrinth


Claudia Hart, 2016
Inside the Flower Matrix (single channel exhibited as 3 channels, each offset by 2.5 minutes, accompanied by an Oculus Rift VR experience)
3 Channel 10 minute movie, computer, software, VR headset


The Flower Matrix is a mixed reality work combining a 3-channel 3D-animation installation and an Oculus touch VR world, with music composed by Edmund Campion, cello improvisations by Danielle DeGruttola, and vocals by Claudia Hart and Mikey McParlane. 


Inside the Flower Matrix is a part of Claudia Hart’s Alice world, reinterpreting the Lewis Carroll paradigm as a labyrinth. Inside the Flower Matrix envisions Wonderland as the Interweb, covered by flashing emoji, the icons for power, money, addiction and control.  Hart’s Internet is commercial stripway, the enactment of Casino Capitalism but at the same time, paradoxically, also a metaphor for a model of the mind and a site of transformation.


The Flower Matrix is specifically modeled after the ancient Roman mythological labyrinth of the Minotaur, an endless maze from which there is no escape. Hart has created a game world covered with pulsing graphical patterns made from emoji, and also from symbolic computer language and public signage icons, conjoined in animated patterns that throb and pulse hypnotically. Also inside the Flower Matrix are five original species of fantastical flowers designed by Hart and covered with the same pulsing patterns, randomly growing and decaying. This is an environment portraying an esthetic of fakeness where technology has replaced nature, both sugary sweet and chemically toxic in equal measures.