Panel Statement
Panel: VIDA: New Discourses, Tropes and Modes in Art and Artificial Life Research
My work aims to emphasize both the physical and the metaphorical ways in which human beings relate with each other and with their environment, mainly indicating the fundamental relationships between our internal and external worlds. These are all of our experiences that determine how things exist to us and how we make experience of the immense not void that surrounds us, in which we are immersed as body and as agents of emotions. Over the years, my work has fused all these fundamentals into the creation of sensorial and perceptual mechanisms, immersive spatial works that are at the intersection of architecture and performance art; they are what I refer to as performance-space expression – the creation of physical spaces, perceptible to the senses, each segment of which contains potential realities, some revealing natural phenomena, some not. My artistic investigation examines how patterns of consciousness, perception and identity emerge in such settings. I use participation as a continuous mutation of the initial spatial conditions, to reinforce the external-to-you as continuously variable. Over the last years I have been specifically interested in a field of research related to the Body as Interface, therefore investigating bioelectricity and biomagnetism. My concern was to show that the boundaries of the self extend beyond our skin. Specifically, I was interested in what skin consciousness is, and how presence, proximity and touch can redirect the way we understand ourselves and others, exploring experiences of bodily expansion. A mutual element in these works is an experimental practice revealing a sense of instability and impermanence. From our individual subjective position we gain access to undiscovered shared phenomena.
- Sonia Cillari was awarded the first prize of VIDA 13.0: Art & Artificial Life International Competition (2010) for her project Sensitive to Pleasure. An Italian media artist and architect, she lives and works in Amsterdam, The Netherlands. Her work involves the creation of sensorial and perceptual mechanisms in immersive and augmented environments. Her artistic investigation examines how patterns of consciousness, perception and identity emerge in such settings. Over the last years she has been specifically interested in a field of research concerning the Body as Interface. She was an artist in residence at V2_, Institute for the Unstable Media, Rotterdam (2004), at the Rijksakademie van Beeldende Kunsten, Amsterdam (2004-2005), STEIM: Studio for Electro-Instrumental Music, Amsterdam (2006 and 2010), Media Art Institute/NIMK (Amsterdam 2006 and 2010), [ars]numerica Montbeliard, France (2009) and Claudio Buziol Foundation Venice, Italy ( 2010). Her interactive installations at the intersection of architecture and performance art have been presented internationally. Besides receiving the First Prize at VIDA 13.0: Art & Artificial Life International Competition, she was awarded the Art Division Excellence Prize at 11th Japan Media Arts Festival, and Honorable Mention at Prix Ars Electronica, Interactive Art and VIDA 9.0: Art & Artificial Life International Competition. She is a teaching advisor at the Frank Mohr Institute, IME Interactive Media Environment Department, Groningen since 2007 and a core group member at Optofonica Laboratory for Immersive Art-Science, Amsterdam since 2010. soniacillari.net Video: Sensitive to Pleasure