Artist Statement

Exhibition, May 14, 2022, Mèdol – Centre d’Arts Contemporànies de Tarragona (Casa Canals). Extended Programme

Based on social live streaming platforms, Transceiver Body seeks to understand how body languages are in constant transformation when hybrid identities are constructed between the multiplicity of the digital, the complexity of the physical and the exploitation of one’s own intimacy over the Internet. The piece is the result of transdisciplinary experimentation presented as a performance based on electronic art, performance and net.art.

During the piece, a series of cameras and electronic circuits distributed the artist’s body, transmit in real time the images captured from different points of view. Simultaneously, the project’s URL receives these video signals and distributes them in different rooms that allow observing and interfering with the body’s behavior through a chat. The popularity of what a body part observes is perceived by the artist as an haptic stimulus by small motors vibrating on her skin. A word typed in a chat by an online participant is translated into robotic sound through a process called “text to speech” and becomes a trigger for movement.

Using the body itself as a mediating membrane between online and offline audiences, the project opens questions about digital identity in relation with the vocabularies of the body when navigating between the physical and the digital, between viral images, memes, emojis and multiple version of nyam nyam cats in forever loop.

• Citlali Hernández (Mexico City, 1986). My work as an artist focuses on exploring how social and technological codes are inscribed in the ways of inhabiting the body within the framework of electronic and digital arts. From a transdisciplinary perspective, I seek to experience the materialities of performance and its entanglements with cables, pixels and circuits to think of the body as a field of potentialities. I am currently preparing my doctoral thesis at BAU Design University Center (Barcelona, Spain) with the topic “Body, Technology and Performativity: The body in the practices of new media art”. I am a university-level teacher on issues related to product design, digital manufacturing and applied interaction, I am an active collaborator in Matics Barcelona (Digital Art Association) and I am an artist-in-residence together with Núria Nia at Hangar.org with the project “Cuerpo Satelital” supported by the Artistic Research Grant Fundación Banco SAbadell-Hangar in Hangar. [Source: https://turbulente.net]