Annka Kultys is pleased to present the exhibition Cyphoria, a recent video by the London-based artist, Stine Deja, marking the artist’s first show with the gallery in London.

Cyphoria is a travel agency that offers to take you to an extraordinary set of destinations, without being limited by your physical body. The destinations exist in cyberspace and only come to life if you let them. The power of your imagination is a central factor on your journey, as the environments you will visit exist as much inside your head as they do inside the machines that mediate and support them. Cyberspace is the extended nervous system of your body that works on the belief that cyberspace is reality.

Technology has become an architect of our intimacy, everyday we have real intimate moments in the virtual realm. In this project Deja is exploring how the Internet affects our imaginary capacity and our sense of intimacy – emotional capital, and essentially how this affects the experiences that form us as social beings. Are the experiences received by our digital surrogates different or less authentic than those that we experience with our physical bodies?

Cyphoria is more than a hyperlink or a moving image piece; it is a thought experiment imagining a structure – a way of being. The Cyphoria infrastructure has an architectural resemblance to a city, filled with buildings, however, the buildings are not the most interesting part, it is the environments we have created with these buildings. It is through inhabiting the space that we give the city it’s meaning. The community we create – the total sum of construction. Throughout history we have been travelling virtually; drawing, language, storytelling, photographs. Humans have used these tools to travel psychologically to alternative and often imagined places. It acts as a kind of escapism without us really noticing. The artist is exploring this modern phenomenon with a metaphor of a “travel agency” to highlight the experiences we can have without our physical body.