My dear Nippers,

sorry to disappear again, but I can’t manage to travel so much and to be loyal to my NIP friends

Just back from eARTS Festival in Shanghai, it was great!

www.shearts.org/earts/english/node59/node62/index.html
www.aec.at/shanghai_earts07/en/index.asp

As it was great in Lisbon! working with all of you … (love to see some pictures of what we did over there

As I’m not going to be with you for our meeting in Amsterdam in December
I’m writing down my upcoming exhibitions’ schedule for 2007. Maybe some of you is around:
16-18 November: CYNETart_07encounter, TMA Trans-Media Akademie Hellerau, Dresden (Germany) http://body-bytes.de
22-25 November: STRP Festival, Klokgebouw, Eindhoven (the Netherlands) www.strp.nl
1-9 December: Florence Biennale, Fortezza da Basso, Florence (Italy) www.florencebiennale.org/indexeng.html
14-22 December: La scène dans tout ses états. [ars]numerica, Montbéliard (France) www.ars-numerica.net

In the meanwhile, working on my Gynoid (from Greek gyne - woman; artificial female), and its historical categorizations…

Pygmalion and Galatea, Jean-Leon Gerome (1890)

Pygmalion, Giulio Bargellini (1896)

Pygmalion (in Ovid’s Metamorphoses) is a sculptor who falls in love with a statue he has made. A clay statue coming to life …
Beautiful!

I’ll keep in touch mostly by emails for organization issues …
a big kiss
Sonia

Hallo nippers! Here I am****
I have been traveling a lot recently, and going happily mad on my new project!

Here some shots:

Working title: Don’t feel. You are alone.
Media and networked performance in private and public spaces.

How we redefine our sense of personal continuity and uniqueness from other people?
To what extent are women victims of the structures and conditioning imposed on them?
And to what extent could love be the only thing that makes things real?
This project is meant to explore concepts such as power, identity, body and sexuality.
So, I continue to focus on how technologies can increasingly mediate the experience
of our existence, but I’m taking the risk to do something I’ve never done before: I will
perform as a female/automaton, capable of acting automatically without emotive forces.
As the android is unaware of the condition of being ‘intimate’, the work causes
experiences in the participants of non-intimacy and non-control. This is a new approach
for me: the creation of a map of behavior that is not ‘human’.

I’m in the phase ‘research’: a lot of things are fascinating me…

Technologically: still in process.
Some of the topics: 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 outputs,
networked communication…

Very appealing to me is “VeriChip”, an implantable, radio frequency identification biochip
slightly larger than the size of a grain of rice, which can be scanned to give a unique
ID number.

I have kind of clear how people will communicate with me in public and private spaces.
My concern is more about how to construct the memory of the android: she has a
memory/hardisk which will collect all the information referring to the interaction she has
with people. All these information (visual, sound and generically sensorial) are collected
and “played-back” using an unique pattern of montaje…

interaction in private space/intimate

The body is always interrogative-always a question, an ambivalence about what is
experienced in the body and how the body is represented and constructed in the social,
cultural and physical worlds that it inhabits and paricipate in. Is the body ‘connected’ and
if so to what? Is the body ‘disconnected’?-and if so how?

I see you soon in A’dam!