Artist Statement

Keywords: Online video remix, extrasensory perception, sublime, informational complexity, mind waves.

How about the emergence of a specific kind of consciousness when we experience the sublime? What happens in the brain when our sensorial and extra-sensorial systems experience a state of astonishment – when these systems find themselves over-whelmed, unable to comprehend a phenomenon in its totality due to its informational complexity? In the present paper, the authors present and discuss a collaborative project where they are exploring the experience of revealing and facing the sublime by navigating personal online video memories, driven through databanks by our mind waves. To face the extreme in our emotions, in situations that detaches the self from normality, no matter if in deep meditative practices when in search for mindful awareness, or even jumping from a mountain with a paraglide, the sublime has the power to transform our informational structure – the sublime is disruptive.

• Milena Szafir received in 2011 the most important Brazilian Prize – “Sérgio Motta Art and Technology Award” – by the body of her work, performed during the last ten years as an emerging artist. In the same year, her online interactive video “YouToRe-mix”(2011) was awarded in the “International Digital Art 3M Exhibition”. She has been regarded as one of the pioneers in Brazilian live cinema/ vj’ing scene (1990-2000’s). At present she is a professor at Institute of Art & Culture, Federal University of Ceara, Brazil, and a Ph.D. candidate at the University of São Paulo, School of Communications and Arts. She was a co-chair in the “EuroITV Grand Challenge Competition” (2010-2013) and her research main interests are on the audiovisual apparatus, remix video montage [editing], low & high technologies, live streaming [web] television, surveillance situations, spectacle media and communication as art (& vice-versa).
• Clarissa Ribeiro, Ph.D., is a media artist and researcher. She is currently the main Associate Professor of Roy Ascott Studio in Shanghai, China. Recently, she was awarded a Fulbright grant in Arts, and was living in Los Angeles, California, as a Postdoctoral Research Scholar, connected to the UCLA Art| Sci Center and Lab, collaborating with artists and scientists that are running cutting edge projects in their areas. During her Ph.D. in Visual Arts by the University of Sao Paulo, Brazil, by the time she was together with the Gilbertto Prado’s group, she was a visiting research member of the CAiiA-Hub of the Planetary Collegium, UK. As an independent artist, she has been producing and exhibiting a series of experimental interactive installations exploring complex affectiveness through macro scale metaphorical translations of the non-local phenomenon of quantum entanglement. At present, regardless of living in Shanghai, she is still ‘non-locally’ collaborating with the Art|Sci Collective.