In his artistic practice, Justin Urbach uses time-based media to research the integration between humans and virtual reality, focusing on questions of mediality, materiality, supposed masculinity, transformative processes, and hybridity. To this end, he creates virtual and partly immersive visual worlds in his video installations, whose reference to reality he breaks in the form of brief displays of image or sound content, so-called glitches. The medium and with it the basic material and technological conditions are systematically revealed and questioningly addressed in the works.
In his photographic works, Urbach emphasizes the process of creation, with graininess and traces of dust inscribed in the image, marking the material’s development process’s basic conditions. Urbach is particularly interested in the relationship between human and nature and contrasts the cool, mechanized environment with seemingly irrational emotionality and vulnerability, exploring the hybridity of these two worlds. The figures usually follow the narrative of an incomplete transformation. The gaze is consciously directed to the camera and thus also to the aesthetic means of a cinematic visual language, which are thus thematized as tools for exploring the hybrid nature of human existence.
Dominik Bais, 2021