by Kavi
In 2006, I drew this short story about the imagined far future and a woman who gazes out of the window at a breath-taking panoramic view of the futuristic city. I wanted to capture the passing time and the motion of slowly disappearing elements on the paper. Thinking in line with the Digital Media online exhibition and curatorial theme for 2020-2021 Invisibility :: Complexity :: Resistance :: Intentionality, this drawing kept coming into my mind. It resonated with me deeply in connection with the subject of invisibility. I wanted to revisit this work and add animation and sound to it while keeping to the original storyline.
The years 2020 and 2021 have been filled with unknowns and ideations about the future that awaits us past pandemic. This old drawing resonates with the current mood and how I feel about isolation and communicating to the world at large through digital means. The real world seems slowly dissolving behind the screens of digital, pixelated, and noisy contents.
I question how this newly practised remote connectedness affects us individually and on much deeper levels. I wonder how lack of physical communication and touch that offer immediate feedback loop and strengthens our communications and self-awareness gets eroded through limited experience online worlds. Even though this is best what we can afford in staying connected, I wonder if the need for a more profound and more authentic human connection would also inform the future developments of our technologies.
Radio waves remind me of the technology invented to capture and transmit messages that imagined another form of connectivity between us over distances. In this video, I recorded a radio tuned to a wavelength devoid of any intended transmissions. It suggests a space where we search for each other, amongst lost-in-translation messages left a while ago and picked up again. This out-of-tune, non-real-time, sliced-up presented reality is this new space where we dwell invisible to others and invisible to ourselves.
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Bio:
Ilze Briede [artist name Kavi] is an artist nomad traversing across various art disciplines and foraging multiple media into mutual conversations. Kavi’s current research explores the intersection between human and non-human, biological, digital and artificial processes and systems, and potential cross-collaborations. She aspires to develop more informed human-computer-human interaction models that will bring technology and humans closer together. Her research-creation methodology is rooted in exploring aspects of materiality, performance, live coding, and experimentation. Kavi is currently a first-year PhD student in Digital Media at York University.