"Lines of Light Ranged in the Nonspace of the Mind*"

It is surprising to find that virtual space is in fact based on ancient cultural principles. A strange space, with no taste or smell, wind or sun – a binary space made up mostly of combinations of the numbers 1 and 0, that we experience through a bright screen, as if peering through a "window". Still, this "environment" is based on the same mathematical principles that underlie our perception of space and the science of perspective as they were developed in the fourteenth and fifteenth centuries. The illusion of a familiar space that functions according to familiar laws conceals the reality of a virtual environment, in which our body has no existence, and neither do our physical experiences or specific viewpoint.

In this equation, real space surrenders to the laws of virtual space. In this context, Dr. Carmel Weissman refers to our period as 'post-human', precisely because we willingly renounce our bodily experience in favor of a virtual, abstract, and mathematical one: "It seems that in the game of doubles reality has lost to a mathematical copy […] numbers are the medium that is now the message." Thereby a spatial experience is created that is limited and filtered through screens, yet is, at the same time, meta-temporal and omnipotent.

This "clean" space seems to be taking us ever nearer to the divine or the eternal – after all, the web affords us eternal life in the form of avatars and profiles that exist long after our physical body has ceased to exist. In fact, the virtual space relies on the age-old separation of body and mind. In this case the mind is numerical, screen-bound, eternal, and rational. It has no need for the body, which sits before it in a fixed position and is almost inactive.

If sublime truth and eternity are just behind the screen, we may ask: what is the importance of the real, physical world? We spend our lives in endless feedback loops facing screens and devices. While they become our main space of activity by mediating all of our information and "environments" – work, leisure, society, and family – it seems the surrounding world becomes an optical illusion and a superficial, material setting. This sensation intensifies the longer we remain inside our homes in an attempt to protect our bodies.

The artists in this exhibition react in different ways to the collapse of real and virtual spaces one into the other and to the ways in which the familiar slips into the strange. Theoretical, numerical, and sensory abstraction becomes, in these works, the abstraction of color, form, and material, with the spaces presented in them shifting along the seam between the mundane and the fantastic.

Participating artists: Eyal Agivayev, Oren Eliav, Tamir Erlich, Mika Hazan Bloom, Barak Chamo, Michal Luft, Elinor Salomon, Elena Rotenberg, Itamar Stamler

* The name of the exhibition is taken from William Gibson's novel Neuromancer.