Oliver Lardner

Oliver Lardner is an artist working across virtual reality, game design, and installation. His practice examines how emerging technologies such as VR and Machine Learning are reshaping public space and collective experience, often staging works that move between physical sites and headset-based virtual environments. Through virtual pavilions, immersive worlds, and hybrid installations, his work asks what “public art” means inside private head-mounted displays. Lardner has exhibited nationally, and his VR work has been recognised by the Australian Game Developer Awards. He is based in Melbourne and is completing his Master of Fine Art (Research) at Monash University. At Linden, he is developing new work that explores the gallery and its surrounds as a hybrid physical–virtual site.

Artists are rarely admired for their technical ability alone, but instead their contribution to the expansion of our shared cognitive surfaces. A cognitive surface refers to an additional attribute belonging to an art work which is able to stretch a public and shared imagination in some way: to shift the cognitive surface. When this relationship is operating correctly, artists can create new ways of understanding the world and in this way create more space than either they or their works occupy. Historically this conceptual expansion came primarily through engagement with new and emerging technologies. However, unusually perhaps, artists who were once guardians of this important role now actively fight against this paradigm. We can now observe many contemporary artists persisting with a business-as-usual approach, creating paintings that perpetuate preexisting surfaces, which further cement exisiting boundaries that surfaces can also create.

Drawing upon my experiences as a programmer, specifically with writing code art, I wish to apply the political and inherently anarchistic qualities of digital distribution and code art to the idea of "surface" and challenge traditional notions of artistic labor.