CROSSLUCID is an interdisciplinary collective from Berlin and the synthesis of the young artist duo Sylwana Zybura and Tomas C. Toth:
“Appearing in a transitional reality, its aim is to instigate new associations and investigate the possibility of novel arrangements. Its current practice spans video, photography, collage, installation, character design and creative direction. CROSSLUCID accelerates the intersection between realities with their combinations of multifaceted visual systems and performative practices.”(2)
Our identities can be created and communicated by fashion and style.
Thus, the self has become a virtual unity constantly in flux.
The self-designed body is a hybrid and synthetic fabric basically woven through interactions and interdependencies. And, it evolves as a subject mainly in relation to the other and the object. It is CROSSLUCID’s deep interest to explore the extent to which people nowadays construct their identities - sexually, culturally, and politically. Especially, the reflection of emerging advanced technologies, that constitute the way our human bodies and minds now communicate with each other, also plays a crucial part in their artistic research. The impact of technological progress on visionary body concepts ultimately leads to manifold new ways in which the fabric of identity can be transcended, establishing a fundamental potential of fluid variables and fashionable expressions of the synthetic self and its perceptions by others. Herein, CROSSLUCID’s multi-sensory workings function as a design laboratory of visionary ideas, and their mesmerizing imagery as artistic prototyping.(3)
For example, within an ongoing series of intimate portraits of strikingly captivating and intricate personalities, the human body is being analyzed, (de-)constructed, and dispersed, staged as well as iconized. Yet, at the same time, that body also appears in a state of uncertainty, cyborgization, and metamorphose: The designed self here appears rather unstable and glitchy, seamlessly slipping between one virtual avatar and the other.
Captured in fascinating gender indeterminacy, or rather in a fashionable agender, these stylized bodies occupy a realm of quantum possibility, suspended indefinitely, they resist the inexorable impetus towards division and otherness.(4)
Apart from the low-key material sourcing as well as elaborate and meticulous prop creation, hereby referring to surrealistic collage and montage, the subsequent construction of new identities and hybrid characters has been an unrehearsed, stimulating exchange of aesthetic sensibilities and creative sympathies between the portrayed and CROSSLUCID,5 as the artists Sylwana Zybura and Tomas C. Toth emphasize: “Our ongoing project Landscapes Between Eternities has been conceived in a mode where within the boundaries of the absolutely momentary, and thus very instinctual space we were simulating the creation of the composition/ prototyping of parallel identities mapped on our subject.
This had established an exciting tension during this process, investigating the possibilities for the self to morph (or to allow this morphing) into its potentialities.” (6) [...]
