Bjarne Melgaard

• My Trip 2023
  2023, Immersive multi-screen installation
  Commissioned by LFF Expanded and Outernet Arts, produced by Acute Art

Bjarne Melgaard’s artwork takes the viewer on a journey to the furthest reaches of the web and explores the apathy that our technological environments engender. My Trip 2023 features characters that have recurred in the artist’s practice for over 25 years, in addition to new mutant personalities created in collaboration with Acute Art. This artwork, presented as a fully immersive multi-screen installation at partner venue Outernet, questions how we choose to live – exploring the never-ending flow of information that is consumed daily through a striking visualisation of a psychedelic experience.

• AR series
  2020, Augmented Reality

  Cheese Man

  Lightbulb Man

  Lightbulb Man dressed as Les Sapeurs

  Devil Man

  Octo with Ostrich Egg

Bjarne Melgaard’s AR project uses characters and motifs from his wider oeuvre, which reference a multitude of current and historical affairs; from the colonisation of The Democratic Republic of the Congo in Central Africa, to the international influence of Big Tech, as well as the recent removal of colonial statues in Europe and the USA.

• My Trip
  2019, Virtual Reality
  12:30 Mins

Bjarne Melgaard’s virtual reality artwork takes the viewer on a journey to the farthest reaches of the dark web. Melgaard compares the experience to taking Dimethyltryptamine (DMT), a naturally occurring drug, which is produced by a gland in the brain. DMT is considered the strongest hallucinogenic chemical substance and is found in almost every living organism on earth.

Melgaard’s work is influenced by authors Stig Sæterbakken, David Benetar and Paul Ehrlich; The Sofa: A Moral Tale, a 1742 libertine novel by Claude Prosper Jolyot de Crébillon; and, Black Metal band, Darkthrone. Featuring characters that have recurred in the artist’s practice for over 25 years, including Lightbulb Man and Octo, in addition to new mutants and personalities created in collaboration with Acute Art, My Trip is a strikingly stimulating visualisation of the illusions of a DMT experience.

Beginning with the idea of suicide as an existential question, new psychedelia, and the loss of the self within a DMT trip, this work asks questions regarding life and how we choose to live it whilst introducing Melgaard’s perspective on Anti-Natalism and over-population. The artist is raising the contradictory view that if we are to continue to exist, humans will have to cease to procreate, as a result of the carbon impact of producing new human life.

My Trip also explores the abyss of the technological underground, the endless information consumed every day and the feeling of apathy and dullness that this technology consequently produces.

The work is accompanied by a soundtrack created specifically for My Trip by Melgaard’s long-time collaborator Romina Cohn.