Participating Artist

www.soniacillari.net

As a media artist and architect, Sonia is fascinated by how human beings experience space and how humans, as perceivers, reconstruct the internal and external world by means of our sensory system. Taking a subjective and personalized notion of space and body, Sonia’s work includes the creation of sensory and perceptual mechanisms in immersive and augmented environments. Her work examines how consciousness, perception and identity emerge in such settings.

Over the last few years, Sonia has been specifically interested in a field of research concerning the ‘Body as Interface’, developing what she refers to as a ‘Performance Space Expression’ in which the personal experience of space is an illusion, and in which gesture, visuals and sound play an important part.

This investigation deals with how we reveal our existence to others. Working with the ‘Body as Interface’, Sonia takes the idea of people as attractors or containers of interconnected-events. Interactivity is experienced through the body and used to explore the possibility of distance from and within ones personal environment, how certain freedoms can provoke experiences of extension and how from our lonely subjective position we can gain access to undiscovered, imaginative, shared phenomena.

Sonia N.I.P. interests

During the NIP workshop series I would like to investigate technological devices to further develop a prototype, which I’m currently working on a performance between myself and an android character. Building on my previous work, this project will continue my investigations into how we experience digital and physical space and how people’s perceptions of their environment can influence their social interaction within that environment (e.g., intimate, personal, social and public space).

Rigging my body with sensors, I am interested in exploring how ’sense’ can be mapped through: eye tracking, speech recognition, environmental audio recording, electric field sensing, muscle sensors, camera based motion capture, wearable and environmental sensors, gestural input, kinetic responses, real-time video/audio out outs, networked communication etc. Through these devises I pick up environmental information, which will be translated onto screens and acoustic coordinates in space, which are mapped on to an android character. I am particularly interested in examining how our ’sense’ of intimacy and emotion can be mapped on to the android character. To achieve this project, I will need to collaborate with others working within interaction engineering, interactive systems design, network and communication technology, musicians/composers and programmers, as it would be inspiring to work together with dancers, choreographers etc.

Technologies that Sonia has used

Hardware: Electric Field Sensing, Magentic sensors, Head tracking (stereo glasses with cameras), Augumented Reality Displays, Motion Capture.
Software: Virtools; VRML, Cortona, OpenGL (SGI) 3D applications such as 3D Studio Max, Character Studio Video editing applications: Final Cut, Premiere Multimedia applications: Director, Dreamweaver Programming enviroment: Max/MSP/Jittter, OGRE