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As a young woman in Brazil in the 1970s working with computer and image technologies - how were you perceived by the people around you?
I think that being a woman has not influenced my role as an artist and researcher. I am sure that the influences and results are favored by my personal agency, my characteristics, my beliefs and challenges, my critical attitude and connections to people and things, and other everyday impacts present in my conceptual framework. The proximity to technical teams, studios, and labs, as well as my spirit and ability to provoke technologies, also remind me of the negative attitude some people had towards my artwork, which disappointed the established art circle. I spoke differently, and the rejection from other people was "normal." But I was convinced and very responsible for my inner laws. So, these reactions of people were at the same time a rupture of the information and expectations of the people around me, which triggered my reactions. I believe that the history of art shows what the real contributions are, which are always in dialogue with the inventions and scientific issues of the time. We are not out of our time. In parallel, the artist feels the atmosphere of life and reinvents his own language. Through this closeness, the artistic, aesthetic, technical and anthropological questions of humanity are posed and revived. Science is an intimate zone for creativity and for the reinvention of life.
How did you come to work with electronic media and then combine it with art?
Since the ‘70s, my artwork was placed in the hybrid territory of performance, prints and installation which included the visitor into the piece.
My husband was a pediatrician and in the ‘70s he used an electronic stethoscope to amplify the sound of the children’s heart during the consultation. And this device inspired me to make the series: Electrourbs, Electroprints, (images) where daily objects were invaded by heart sounds.
In my exhibition ELECTROURBS in 1979 at N.O. Space, Porto Alegre and after in 1982 at Funarte, Galeria Macunaíma, I used an electronic stethoscope to create a heart sound landscape inside the white cube to fill the empty space. I added an oscilloscope connected to amplifiers and used the flux of electrical waves to visualize the cardiac sound traces inside the art space.
In another work, where visitors were invited to sit in a black Thonet balance chair, they were allowed to hear and record the visitor’s blood flow. The cardiac sounds emitted by the stethoscope were transformed into time-varying electrical voltages, corresponding to sound pressure visualized into a transduction of heart electrical waves. These electric voltages were displayed at the oscilloscope, and the viewer could visualize the waveform of the heart sounds which could also be heard simultaneously with the displayed waveform. Additionally, red neon lights installed in the environment setup, contrasted with the heart beatings, as the sounds of blood flow could be heard synchronically with the heart beatings. The reception of this work by the public was very positive, and many people reported that they felt great seeing their hearts in connection with the sounds and the ones mutating in the oscilloscope display.
In terms of enactive systems, my recent research, this piece announced topics of the inserted organism in the environment and the mutual exchanges of technological apparatuses. All these topics are enhanced in my actual artwork related to embodiments and enactive systems in body through the mutual exchanges of living systems, physiology and aesthetic appeal also in the realm of heath and creative technologies.
In the ‘90ies you started exploring medical technologies to visualize the inner world of our body, which was very exceptional and unusual for exhibition audience at that time. Can you remember how the visitors reacted to your unusual art installations?
The audience was fascinated in every way, it was a different territory or a very intimate moment that offered to discover life, to engage in the sensory experience and moments of the body in full work. The expansion of perception and unusual moments place a technological environment in the magical territory of reinvention of life.
The body and social aspect have always been addressed in your installations – and in many other interactive artworks -, but in your case especially in connection with the themes trance and rituals. How does technology and digitality come into play?
The body feels and the environment gains qualities of algorithms and devices confirming the embodied cognition. However, as the code itself is not art, but is used to constitute an artistic project, the software development of code and calculation and language operations take place with a view of interactions through aesthetic and social relations, based on perceptive theories and content construction that form a symbolic context for performative operations of those who experience the system. Erkki Huhtamo, in his seminal text “Cyberarts, codes and coders: contextualizing Software Art”, points out that it is no longer the well-known slogan of John Berger “each image embodies ways of seeing”, which could perhaps be modified by “each Software embodies ways of using”. Many artists and some engineers became recognized artists developers of software. Only to mention some pioneers of the long list: Myron Krueger, David Rokeby, the painting and drawing machines created by Harold Cohen, the artificial intelligence and robotic environments of Ken Rinaldo, the social interfaces for online communities of Bruce Damer's worlds, all of which are code authors. There is also the social software of art collectives such as etoy, the immersive virtual reality environments of Maurice Benayoun and Jean-Baptiste Barrière or the pioneers Edmond Couchot, Marie-Hélène Tramus and Michel Bret, the collaboration of Christa Sommerer and Laurent Mignnoneau with the scientist Tom Ray for artificial life, the productions of Jeffrey Shaw with ZKM programmers, among many other examples of software writing in collaboration between artists and scientists. Some artists invest in aesthetic qualities and modes of perception, in the subjective charge and in the surprises of interactions, others create alternatives for social groups. Thus, it is worth taking Howard Rheingold's statement that these are not hardware devices or software such as programming, but “social practices”. These operations of use and their aesthetic bases are the subject of investigations in our artworks to facilitate the creation of environments marked by interactivity, immersion, ubiquity, mobility and autonomy, which modify the body existence and respective living maps.
Why do you propose the naturalization of technologies?
The limits of the human and the natural are exceeded, copulations of organisms and technologies in life phenomena are influencing daily narratives. The technological apparatus gains disruptive structures at every level and in every type of interactivity when it adapts the technologies used with other qualities that change the ways of life when they are allowed to enter data structures. It is routine to do things and solve tasks in the digital world. Synthetic shapes, social platforms, online services, so bizarre in the 90s, are quite familiar now. For example, the beginning of the computer use of the synthetic worlds in VR started to offer immersion and navigation in virtual scenes, considered an evasion of the material world. In the 90s, when Howard Rheingold visited Scott Fischer at Nasa´s Cave, and worn the head-mounted displays, he said: “Oh, My God, Cyberspace arrived” (RHEINGOLD) He was referring to William Gibson´s Neuromancer term: cyberspace (GIBSON, 1984) and affirming the immersion and navigation in data as the feeling of placelessness, evasion of organisms within synthetic data landscapes. However, very soon, the world was invaded by the cyberspace locative, ubiquitous, and mobile interfaces that offer the sense of been everywhere inside the material world connected to data. So, it is appropriated the Gibson´s assertive who coined the term Cyberspace when he proclaimed in the novel, Spook Country: a novel: “Oh my God, Cyberspace is everywhere” (GIBSON, 2007)
How did your usual working process look like, when designing and creating an artwork, like for example OUROBOROS? Did you program the interfaces by yourself, or did you have a collective you worked with?
Since 2010 I hold the position of Senior Visiting Professor at FGA/UnB, a very relevant position for art and science. There I first started with the Biomedical Engineering, and after with the Science, Technology and Health Program, at UnB Ceilandia. In addition, since 2013, I am a collaborating researcher at the Computing Institute, working in HCI researches, now dedicated to a socio-enactive project. One of the projects, entitled ‘Reengineering Life: Creative Technologies for the Expanded Sensorium’, is part of an international collaboration between LART/FGA/CNPq and the Camera Culture Media Lab at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology (MIT). Through this project, members of the LART research group have the opportunity to work in the environment of Camera Culture Media Lab at MIT.
Our “New Leonardos” and collaborative teams configure the methodological principles of transdisciplinary practices, turning boundaries of Contemporary Art and Science to the direction of innovative practices involving pioneer artists, established artists and the next generation of New Leonardos. It is a "bottom-up" atmosphere that brings together people who cannot exist in a rigid environment and seek a more sophisticated and fruitful integration between fields.
In your recent theories on human-technology symbiosis you talk about “mobile enactive systems”. Can you please explain a bit more what you mean by this?
Mixed with life, cyberspace adds the digital technologies to humanities’ ethnographic methods for the understanding of the effects of the seamless, nomadic, mobile, and ubiquitous condition. The computer disappears in the periphery (WEISER op. cit, 1995). The HCI design evolves from interactive to enactive systems, and increasingly blends with life, thanks to mobile technologies and location-based interfaces that allow intuitive connection to cyberspace. The category of enactive systems favors the embodied cognition. Or, it is about the complex system of interdependence between the technological apparatus, the organisms, and the environment in their mutual, reciprocal exchange in cognitive approaches and at the physiological level. This complex system provides the ecological perception as postulated by James Gibson’s theories of perception (1986), now extended by the complexity of sensors, with synesthetic biofeedback, sending and processing vital data measured during the enactions. Networks and wireless connections increased the ubiquitous and mobile computing with data visualization, sensorial expansion, and cross-modal interactivity coming from complex relationships. In our researches, theories from phenomenology, cognitive sciences, and biomedical engineering laws provide the foundations to Art and TechnoScience practices, by building a set of concepts and metaphors resulting of enactions, perception, and actions (NOÉ, 2002), affordances and ecological perception (GIBSON op cit, 1986), and my classification of ouroboric perception (DOMINGUES, 2017).
We are facing a transformation in life, of “nature itself” and the emergence of a technologized reality. Nowadays by the effects of mobile technologies as calm and transparent interfaces installed “in the periphery”, proposed by Mark Weiser, the father of the ubiquitous computing, call for sensorial interfaces in the post-desktop era. The computer is mixed to the world and is almost invisible and goes to disappearing melting to the hybrid world. The computer such as other inventions and artifacts as the cars, the watchs, the planes are part of "periphery” and we interact with devices in transparent interfaces ways – by using mobile and portable devices, sentient objects ( Rheingold, 2002). The biocybrid human condition living by interacting with data, now is expanded the technologies that have gained biological tasks and are increasingly installed in our habitat. We experience mobility, locativity, ubiquity by actions everywhere when we are connected, and our organisms are in mutual exchanges with data and the hybrid physical environment. Interactive Art is really humanizing technologies. To see, to touch, to sensually experience algorithms, infrared waves, to capture invisible forces giving them visibility, to check organic laws give us many experiences of consciousness-propagation in a symbiosis of organic/inorganic life in this post-biological era... Interactive Art embodies traces of biological systems. Plants, human body signals: gestures, speeches, breath, heat, natural noises, water - all these biological phenomena are being translated into computerized paradigms. The body lives and unfolds out of itself during these connections. I believe in the next couple of years, people will normally and matter of factly use computer interfaces in all aspects of their lives and they will interact more and more. The interactions will intensify and will be rather TV-like, to use an analogy to our contemporary technological reality. New biological interfaces will be facilitated as permanent prostheses that are attached to us and in our bodies and thus we will be reinventing our lives and the ultimate nature of our species.
Could you maybe observe over the years how your artistic practice was perceived in Latin America compared to the rest of the world?
I am qualified as Latin American pioneer in Art and Technology. I don't have geographical restrictions for my actions. Prices and recognitions coming from worldwide are confirmed in thousands of mentions in important publications. It is surprising for me the use of my art or the used references in a huge list of artistic, scientific, academic mentions, embracing multiple domains. The authors focusing on different themes make references to my artworks and theoretical repertoire. All this makes me very proud, but also enhances my responsibility for responding to the challenges and transformation in Cultural and Art domains. It is important to highlight that when I started to propose the premise: “the humanization of technologies”, in the 1990s, people´s discussions manifested critical and even apocalyptical opinions against my ideas. However, when nowadays the technologies are installed and playing a disruptive innovation role and are changing the ways of living, I can go ahead and affirm the naturalization of technologies, installed in our daily actions.