Researcher

My scholarship, like my creative practice, flows from my vision of the transformative potential of digital art in the 21st century to explore consciousness. As a Ph.D. graduate from the Planetary Collegium [Center for Advanced Inquiry in Integrative Arts] at the University of Plymouth, UK, under the direction of Professor Roy Ascott, my practice-based dissertation—entitled Space-Time Experience in the Meta-Environment: A Cybersemiotic Analysis--derived from my perspective as a reflective technoetic art practitioner and investigated human-computer interactions (HCI) in interactive hybrid environments and their influences upon mediated consciousness which highlighted the potential of an unique “Cybersemiotic Experience.” This new knowledge has been moving me to explore new ways of constructing experiences in consciousness: observing brain waves as interactive agents (Digital Ayahuasca), developing photographic studies of water and light (Ode to a River), or photo documenting nature as non-material offerings to spiritual entities.

I have exhibited my artwork as well as presented aspects of my research in venues and at conferences and symposia in Brazil, China, Czech Republic, Denmark, Egypt, England, Greece, Lithuania, Norway, Portugal, and the United States, addressing such topics as the aesthetics of space-time in digital environments, the commoditization of digital information, Brazil’s Tropicália movement, and Roy Ascott’s theories of cyberperception and technoetic aesthetics. To ground myself in the theory of cybersemiotics, which is the basis for my research methodology, I took two intensive courses with Emeritus Professor Søren Brier of the Center for Language, Cognition and Mentality at the Copenhagen Business School. Based on my experience in information design, Professor Brier invited me to collaborate in the development of a net environment to disseminate cybersemiotic theory and to become the art editor of Cybernetics and Human Knowing: A Journal of Second Order Cybernetics, Autopoiesis & Cyber-Semiotics (published by Imprint).

My research has also fostered collaborations with artists and researchers from different parts of the world. Among them are Victoria Vesna, director of UCLA’s ArtSci Center who I have been collaborating with in different capacities since 2011, and with Clarissa Ribeiro, director of the CrossLab at the University of Fortaleza, in Brazil who since 2010 we have been critiquing and empowering each others artistic explorations.

As a reflective technoetic art practitioner, designer, educator and researcher, my aim is to continue to expand my practice through interdisciplinary research and artistic collaborations, finding new ways to integrate human perceptions and experiential consciousness with logical processes and concepts.