Digital River, a River Out of Eden: three paintings, a website, and a video. National Young Creators show, 1997, Guarda, Portugal.

Co-workers & Funding

The installation Digital River, a river out of Eden, was created in 1997. I attended a digital arts post graduate course in Porto, in the north of Portugal, where I learned motion graphics, 3D software, and programming languages, with a group of Portuguese, American and Asian-American teachers from the Escola das Artes da Universidade Católica do Porto and Loyola University Los Angeles.

The created mix media environment was presented at the National Young Creators Show in the same year, and it was composed by three digital paintings, a website, and a video. The concept was developed from gained knowledge in digital cultures and screen-based motion graphics software. The goal was to speak about on-screen identity and plasticity, various personas, and masks, and it was inspired by Sherry Turkle’s Life on Screen (1997) and Kevin Kelly’s Out of Control (1995) books.

Ideas about simulation, post Darwinism, nature, bodies, and synthetic evolution were mixed with Turkle’s research, new age music and flashy imagery of recorded children. It was also inspired by a Wired magazine article about Richard Dawkins book named River out of Eden (1995). Through the decontextualization of the scientific text, which appears as an inspiration poem for three paintings, a virtual environment of artificial creatures was built. The video proposed a reflection about the contemporary entertainment culture in which children end up becoming reflections of the digital screen. On the website, the theme of cyberculture was explored through a hypertext under permanent construction where the excess of information in contemporary society was questioned.

For that hypertextual web work, the fictional character P. was created. A human being who felt absolutely nothing, a person who vegetated in a world she/he knew only through images, a world where everything was sent by mail, the food pills together with the corresponding diskette, the updated medical exam and new image helmets. Everything is at disposal through the central services of the networks. P. barely knew her/his/them street, but had vast knowledge about the entire world, no embodied and physical experiences besides rich images available through screens. At that time a non-gendered character was created which also reflected first impressions about the web as a gender free space. The brand-new cyberspace, previously analysed during a one-year sociology course at Lisbon University Fine Arts Faculty (FBAUL), could became a space of oppression if people did not realize its potentialities but also its dangerous. The internet without borders, which opened possibilities for those in peripherical countries such as myself, could became an empty vessel for uninformed content.

Digital River was created before Etoy.CORPORATION toy war (1999) and the dot-com bubble collapse (2000) where speculation took advantage of internet-based businesses and practices, and digital artists started to see their work questioned by systems of elite legitimation like most galleries and museums. In those years I was still enchanted by the Electronic Frontier Foundation and John Perry Barlow chants. I managed to work with digital tools to the web, for the web, with the web and all its promises. At that point I agreed with Virginia Woolf statement “as a Women, I have no country. As a woman I want no country. As a woman my country is the whole world.”