The Electronic Trance
Symposium:
Presentation Title:
- The Electronic Trance
Presenter(s):
Abstract:
In its strong behavioral dimensions, Interactive Art (IA) allows interactions in real time through interfaces that make it possible for man to dialogue with machines. By interacting we share desires, beliefs, emotions and values in ephemeral connections. My interactive installations offer an electronic trance through digital technologies. Bodies connected by interfaces manipulate computer data and provoke”visions” in real time.What matters in these living environments is to experience sensations that we cannot get without technologies. People gain shamanic powers because they can manage electronic metamorphoses. During the trance, shamans go through altered states of consciousness, being able to communicate with the beyond and intervene in the real world because they dialogue with spirits. In the same way, digital technologies in sensorized environments provide us with the power to experience “virtual hallucinations”. Neural networks, inspired in our biological neurological system, learn some patterns of behavior and return to us”visions” in an experience of TRANS-E.
When we are connected, our sensorial apparatus experience complex mutation processes, unforeseen circumstances, dissipations in an integrated sensorial circuit of “trompe les sens” giving us back new identities. In this sense the interfaces are synthetic bodies and neural net¬works provide intelligent behaviors, managing signals of the human body in a sensorized environment. Important is the relationship existing between the several sources of information and what results from this dialogue. In IA we experience the second natural environment. On networked artificial systems, the human body is in a symbiosis with technological/artificial/ natural life, interfacing with the physical/real and virtual/digital.
Interactive Art (IA) pieces put theory into practice. Via IA the artists enhance theoretical paths. Interactive Art offers a real showroom for scientific researches. The artists seek to exceed (excedere), to go beyond the limits. This is exciting, amazing and stimulating for the scientists and technicians. Science people work in friendly collaboration with us because they can catch their thoughts in our pieces.A real collaboration between artists and technicians determines the systems’ behavior and the control of the physical phenomena. Electronic systems capture the invisible forces when they learn behavior and in my art I try to manipulate the technological sublime or the absolutely big, our physical condition and limits enhanced by technologies.Our biological apparatus receiving ultrahuman power (Teilhard de Chardin). The sciences in the end of this century have an increasing interest in the spiritualism of their theoretical approach. Interactive Art is really humanizing technologies. To see, to touch, to experience algorithms, infrared waves, to capture invisible forces giving them visibility, to check organic laws, gives 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, speech, breath, heat, natural noises, water are being translated into computerized paradigms.The body lives unfolding out itself during the connections. I hope that in my installation people get immersed in an enigmatic experience of electronic TRANS-E.
