Digital Self | Presence_Lab is a practical-theoretical research project into intermedia performance poetics based on the concept of alterperformance, a contemporary form of performance art that fuses languages based on interfaces for producing presence: moving image production technologies; live audiovisual projection; biosensors; motion sensors; augmented reality and other devices for composing the “intermedia body”.
The project is developed through a creative platform of practical science, or art-science, aimed at investigating and reinventing the production of presence. Through experiments in courses and alter-performances, Digital Self explores new poetics for expressions of the contemporary Self. A Self that is aware of the spaces it occupies, from the body to virtual environments.
One of the experiments produced in the research is the intermedia performance “Aural Genesis – Live Machina”, in partnership with media artist Caio Fazolin. The performance produces a Digital Self made up of biosensors and parameters generated by real-time algorithmic calculations to compose movements in which body, mind and code are integrated to break stereotypes and conditioning of human behavior and machine interpretation. The creative use of the relationship between digital interfaces, the body and generative audiovisuals proposes an experience of re-reading the aura of the work of art by reconfiguring the autonomy of a body of resistance and presence.
The second of the Digital Self project is “Ethereum,” made up of intermedia performative acts, video performances and self-portraits. Beyond the boundaries between space and bodily anatomy, Ethereum’s body of work proposes a reading of the chemical elements that make up life, relating organic matter, the body and vast spaces based on what is common in their elemental composition.
The project is being developed by performer and researcher Carolina Berger, a post-doctoral student in the Graduate Program in Performing Arts and a member of LabArteMídia — the Laboratory of Arts, Media and Digital Technologies.