Imagine an airless, ethereal and infinite realm. A place where the idealized self lives beyond its biological limitations. No, this isn’t heaven but social media — or the utopian ideal of it anyway. Viewed through this lens, perhaps it’s not so provocative to suggest social media like Instagram, Facebook, Twitter and others collectively form a Heaven 2.0—a virtual equivalent of the afterlife. This is basically the conceit of the Russian art collective Recycle Group‘s new exhibition Heaven Carrier, their first in the U.S., on now at Richard Taittinger Gallery in New York.
Comprised of the duo Andrey Blokhin and Georgy Kuznetsov, Recycle Group is known for using recycled industrial materials for their techno-art. They continue along this track with the works in Heaven Carrier, their attempt to place social media in religious terms through art and spiritual iconography.
“If ‘heaven’ is a transcendent utopia promised by many faiths, and ‘carrier’ is a corporation that provides essential data services, it asks what differences remain between them.”