Elsa de Jong

Elsa de Jong (Nijmegen, Netherlands 1998) 

Elsa creates immersive installations that combine intensive theoretical research with her engagement within the digital realm. Over the years, Elsa has developed a sharp eye and unique taste in digital imagery with a disembodied aesthetic, characterised by ruptured visuals and uncanny landscapes. In her practice, she explores the multiple reality planes existing among us, particularly; the actual, virtual, augmented, imaginary, and online reality. She searches for the tensions, similarities and entangled factors between those planes. By using surrealist methods to approach those realities, she invites the audience to just again, for a few seconds, experience the world without gravity through the curious and unbiased eyes of a child. 

Her graduation work focuses on childhood, growing up, the notion of vulnerability and the internet, using her own experiences as a point of departure. She focuses on the time between 1998 to the present day, which she considers a gateway in time that forced her to break with the past and imagine a new world. In this sense, Elsa’s research and work explores the transitory space between childhood and adulthood which she often refers to as a place without gravity. Such a space without gravity, allowed her to process her own approach to the world as a person, an ageing creature and a knower. Stemming from that, Elsa’s work not only functions to induce a form of introspection but as well a transition back to the child within us; embodying almost a parent figure that teaches you about the world. She began to use the set of perception tools handed to her by her father during her childhood, and applies them to the world of the internet: a world of very attractive, catchy imagery and strong language. A world she explores through touch. It’s a bit ironic though, as the word digital from origin (digitalis) means “pertaining to fingers”.  

Deze pagina is voor het laatst gewijzigd op 18 juni 2021

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