Artist, Designer
The Unbearable Lightness of Swimming is an interactive installation that probes the physicality and digitality of sports. I emphasize that digital media do not erase bodily experience but invites a different sensorial and conceptual engagement.
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Swimming, as a practice, is inherently medium-dependent: the materiality of water orients the athlete’s awareness of bodily rhythms. In this installation, the audience enters a space where water is absent and replaced by a digital environment. As they interact with sensors and attempt to synchronize their bodily gestures with the two-screen visual field, their physical movements, breathing patterns, and mental orientation become disjointed. This intentional discontinuity disrupts the unity of physical experience and draws attention to the digital medium itself.
The work is grounded in my research on the reconceptualization of sports in the digital age. The two pieces overall respond to a critical gap in current sports discourse–the absence of a media-theoretical framework for understanding athletic experience. By staging a sport without its defining medium, the project rethinks what “sport” can be, and asks how athletic perception might be reframed when body, movement, and medium no longer align in familiar ways.