My exploration is grounded in questioning how digital and other technologies shape the way we create meaning — and how we might engage with or resist their effects.
I focus on the value of lived, embodied, multisensory experience in our everyday lives, set against the backdrop of an increasingly virtual, abstracted reality. My work investigates the sense of disconnection many of us experience — both from our own bodies and from the environment — a disconnection that reflects and reinforces our current ecological crisis. If we are not in tune with ourselves, how can we expect to be in harmony with the world around us?
This line of inquiry opens itself to multiple forms of investigation: scientific, philosophical, and creative. It asks how we might examine these emerging conditions, how we might understand their impact, and how we might reimagine our ways of being through more embodied, sensory forms of engagement.
Ophelia in Exile, 2021 (Vitrínka gallery, Czech Centre London)
A multi-media project, questioning the importance of all our senses in giving meaning to our human experience. Its concept was inspired by the recent Covid pandemic and its impact on how we engage with others. The exhibition was one of the manifestations of an ongoing collaborative project Tangible Territory journal, conceived by artist Tereza Stehlíková, and her multi-disciplinary team of TT collaborators from the world of arts, philosophy and science.
The exhibition explores the fictional character of Ophelia, who has been quarantined in her home for an indefinite period of time. Ophelia has been exiled from the outside world: from contact with people, from nature, from a full human experience. Instead, she encounters the world through windows of monitors, engaged in Zoom calls or simply browsing Instagram, searching for images of the natural world which she longs to touch, smell. After many months of her strange sterile existence Ophelia is starting to feel two dimensional, like the version of herself inside a computer monitor. More information: https://london.czechcentres.cz/en/program/ophelia-in-exile
Film featuring Tereza Kamenická
Music Yumi Mashiki
PANDEMIC TRILOGY
3 films I have made, which have been investigating the alienating effects of our use of digital devices to replace embodied, real life encounters. Positioned in the context of embodied spectatorship, the films playfully explore ideas of presence versus representation and the power of image to speak to all our senses.
Self-isolation Dinner, 2020
This was the first film of my trilogy Zoom. Because we were no longer able to meet friends and lovers at a shared dining table, we have resorted to virtual dinners, mediated via computer screens. Taking this concept to an imaginative extreme, the film depicts an encounter between two characters: A man who is “here” and a woman inside the screen. We observe them as they seek to connect around a shared meal, through all their senses, wilfully ignoring the reality of the screen, the window that remains impenetrable.
Film featuring Tereza Kamenická
Music Yumi Mashiki
Zoom Deep Beauty, 2021
We are living at a time when many of our human relationships are mediated by the screen. My own daughter lives in the UK, while I live elsewhere. We communicate on video calls. It is a blessing as well as a curse. While we can speak and also see each other’s expressions, what we lack is the embodied dimension of touch: a simple and powerful hug, the smell of each other, nuance of expression, a kind of atmosphere. This film explores this modern situation in the context of two women, possibly a mother and daughter, who conduct their beauty routine across the screen. The computer is thus treated as both a window into the other person’s reality, but also a kind of mirror, which it has also become for many of us, who spend time on Zoom. The film is part of an ongoing body of work, dealing with themes of embodiment, virtualisation of everyday experience, as well as female relationships and rituals.
Film featuring Tereza Kamenická and Anna Wozencroft
Music Yumi Mashiki
Scent of Zeros and Ones, 2024
As we spend more time in digital spaces, we risk losing touch with the physical world—and with ourselves. Scent of Zeros and Ones explores what happens when we trade deep, embodied experiences for the freedom of virtual existence. The film draws us into a strange, hybrid space where reflections of the real world merge with the digital. A lone, disembodied face floats in a dimly lit, pixelated landscape, shaped by poor internet connection and low lighting. The result is an eerie, semi-abstract atmosphere that blurs the boundaries between self and screen, presence and absence, digital and analogue. AI-generated text—later edited and transformed—further amplifies the film’s exploration of disembodied loneliness. In this world, there is no reference to the felt dimension, no grounding in sensory reality. Instead, we drift—unanchored, with the real world reduced to a distant echo.
Film featuring Tereza Kamenická
Music Yumi Mashiki
Tangible Territory within Blue Hour, Prague Quadrennial festival (2019)
This project was a component of a large collaborative, immersive installation called Blue Hour, which itself was part of 36Q programme . I have been invited by Markéta Fantová, the PQ artistic director, to be in charge of tactile environment. Artist Romain Tardy provided the overall form for our playground – an ice hockey hall converted into a moonscape, containing 36 “pools” distributed evenly across the floor, between two large towers made of scaffolding, on which projection and light were to “perform”.
More writing and images available here:
https://cinestheticfeasts.com/2019/06/20/tangible-territory-within-blue-hour/ https://cinestheticfeasts.com/2019/06/22/tangible-territory-being-animated/ https://cinestheticfeasts.com/2019/07/12/tangible-territory-teaser/
Tereza Stehlíková 