For the 2024 YCC Party, artist Rachel Rossin will transform the iconic rotunda into a hybrid virtual environment.
New York–based Rachel Rossin (b. 1987, West Palm Beach, Florida) is a painter and self-taught programmer whose multi-disciplinary practice has established her as a pioneer in the field of virtual reality (VR). Her art blends painting and sculpture with emergent technologies, gaming, and video to create landscapes that illuminate the intersection between our digital and physical worlds.
Rossin is known for depicting environments that fuse the technological aspects of avatars, computer vision and military imaging with the more visceral traits of lived experience. For example, in some works she adapts conditions of our real world—gravity, heat, space, mapping, the senses—and grafts them into digital environments, while in others she simulates three-dimensionality by marking digital image coordinates and translating the outcome into a painting. Alternatively, she might create an avatar in a metaverse in which the avatar is detected by artificially made heat mapping. Rossin’s work can be seen as a new form of outsourced sensing that bridges the realms of virtual and physical space.