part of Issue 01

Electric Wigs and Digital Depths

Exploring Transformative Art in the Technological Age by Livia Ribichini

Livia Ribichini

“Envision a world where every

strand of your hair is a cable.

A future scenario where our anatomy has

merged with technology

to the points where our bodies can garner

energy from external forces.

The source of this energy is an

electric wig made up of cables

that you can recharge

when put in ‘sleep mode’.

Each strand is mechanically

renewed by a machine

to strengthen and change its colour,

igniting and extending

the possibilities of fueling our bodies

without disrupting

our planets’ natural resources”.¹

The electric wig is the fusion of human anatomy and technology, enabling sustainable living and expanded possibilities for self-expression.

Now, picture yourself swimming in the ocean’s depths. The bottom is cold and dark, neither light passes through. You keep swimming, that’s your habitat. While going up, the environment becomes lighter and brighter. You see the edge of the water. A moving silver ripple that irradiates sun rays. That’s the limit, take a nice breath. You can’t fly but you can swim. The edge of the water, the mirror, Narciso and our own reflections, our own simulacra. Progress is limited, the Earth is screaming mercy. Oh nature, mother and stepmother.

Our production reached the edge, we are polluted, we can’t generate new material and new waste but we can rethink what was invented until now and recycle it, revisit it, relook it, change its function.

Our navigation through the digital landscape reflects the limitations of unchecked technological progress and the need for sustainable innovation. Imagine your fiction. Creativity is not about restless production but about thoughtful sustainable reinvention.

What is a glitch if not a resistance to a system?

A Glitch is a vehicle of refusal and nonperformance that pushes back against the rigid norms imposed on bodies and identities. “We use ‘body’ to give material form to an idea that has no form... A body that refuses to perform the score is a glitch. This glitch is a form of refusal.”²

The presence of the glitch critiques the normative systems of domination in which it exists a method that pushes against the “layers of obfuscated protocols that find their origin in ideologies, economies, political hierarchies, and social conventions.”³
404: Error.

In a world that teaches us to collaborate with the Matrix, with constant power turned always on, there is nothing more radical than not following pre-established canons.

When are we gonna recharge the extensions of ourselves, our devices, with the kinetic movement of our vaginal bacterial flora? I want to be self-sufficient sometimes.

The digital media helps the democratization of self-expression that, if before was in the hands of few privileged people, now it allows the learning process to be creative and to become the accessible bridge for everyone to educate themselves in imagining critically and autonomously.

DREAMSCREENS//

The present society spreads in the informational revolution, a revolution that inevitably affects our way of being in the community. Composite entities, fragmented personalities, producers of different realities that define themselves as a mass of atoms moving inside a fluid brownian motion without a centrality.

It is hard to discern between ourselves and our apparatus.

We, cyborgs, are part of an immense network that is producing collective intelligence.

The circulation of learning is based on our contents, a fractal system made of nodal points that connect humans all around cyberspace.

We are an ecosystem of ants, synapsis that create a cumulative and stratified knowledge as stratified is the morphology of the ground under our feet.

We are producers and consumers of the redundancy of the image. Images of which we are not always aware; as our subconscious that shows itself through symbols, objects, visions.

The image can be free if it is left to be floating through the immense territory of our fantasy.

Information is travelling in the sky of humanity.

We can build new utopias, new futures, new ways of being together.

Let’ s hoist the veil of imagination, this is an ode to freedom!

Sail the ship and travel with me into my imaginary places.

P-Prrroliferation of VPNs, open-source websites, online libraries, free software.

Omnipresence, idealised versions of ourselves, anxiety, burnout.

Individuals empowerment.

Societal pressure.

In this panorama, coding emerges as a powerful tool for liberation, shifting individuals from passive consumers to active creators of technology. By learning how to code, we reclaim agency over the digital tools that shape our lives, communities build their own cultures around emerging technologies, while the internet has facilitated unprecedented communication and collaboration among artists. This has enabled them to develop their own tools and significantly impact art and culture, democratising technology and fostering innovation.⁴

ANIMALS KEEP EVOLVING INTO CRABS⁵

In the kingdom of reflections⁶, flags of recognition⁷

are hoisted on the massive walls of the village. In every corner, every street, every viewpoint you can find them. There are many of them and they are completely different from each other. Full of merging colours, sometimes it looks like the flag is changing shape and texture, especially during the transition between day and night, which is a magical moment for the villagers and for the flags of recognition. Everytime there is a newborn in the kingdom they invent a new flag, so everyone has a personalised one.

Anyway, this kingdom is an itinerant village, a nomadic one⁸. Entire neighbourhoods are

built on big constructions of long wood sticks that reach up to 30 metres. And these neighbourhoods can move.

The best engineers of the kingdom are part of the communal syndicate and every four months they fix the mechanism that allows the neighbourhood to move. If you look at them from a distance you see some kind of urban agglomerations, where the houses are built of each other, it seems like an elephant-favela that walks on the water. The great physicists use the communal syndicate to help with the use the natural light of a far electron, we can call it sun to let you understand, and two to the water in which the sticks stand, the reflection of the energy from the far electron irradiates the entire kingdom. It's blissful in the day, the little streets are covered by a diffuse pink and cozy light and by the night time everything reflects blue, even the skin of the villagers! Now you can say: what if there is a cloud that covers the energy of the electron? Is there going to be any kind of shadow? I can answer that. Thanks to the moving mechanism inside the neighbourhoods, they can store and use just a bit of the light and they can keep it for one year!

The kingdom has banks of lights that are accessible to everyone and the light is enough for everyone, forever.

About the villagers, they are welcoming people. For them the view is the best sense they can have.

By looking⁹ at each other in the eyes¹⁰ they can travel through time, I guess this is why

they have recognition flags all around. So crazy, when someone looks in the eyes of the other, he/she/they can see his/her/their reflection and the other person sees his/her/their reflection; it is like an equal dialogue, where through the other they can recognize themselves. But don't try it at home, this is valid just in here, I think that's for some scientific reasons, such as the energy of the electron and the moving mechanism. 15 people live in every neighbourhood, so by calculating that: because here there are 7 neighbourhoods, we have a sum of 210 recognitions and time travels.

Here mirrors do not exist, you can say that maybe the water below could work as a kind of mirror, but not and that is because the energy of the electron is too strong that if you look at the water you can see just the colour white¹¹ and also it is important to know that you can go down the water just in a specific period of the year. So the recognition phenomena happens just through the eyes of the other!

When the moon is at the higher zenith point and the far electron is at the lower zenith point, the young kids go down the 30 metres long sticks-moving-legs and start to fish. The fishing poles are the ancient sticks of a previous neighbourhood that disappeared and the wire is recycled from spider wires. Here spiders are divine animals and they celebrate them by fishing in the zenith period I just told you and that lasts three months and a half. The people become very tall at thirty years old, the legs grow 3 metres in 7 days and that is the moment where the villagers leave the kingdom.

There is a long and resistant wire that has been there since the zero¹² age, is the most famous thing they have. The legend says that the first spider¹³ in history built this wire until the electron/sun. We do not know if that is true or where the wire really goes, but it's part of life here. It is normal to not know. At thirty years old people leave the kingdom, hanging on the wire to reach the electron.

Some stories say that we do not know anything about it because when people arrive there, they become part of the energy¹⁴.

Transformation is a key theme in digital art, where the creation of other identities and the transformation of the self are central to the medium. In the digital world, artists and individuals can experiment with multiple selves, creating identities that transcend traditional boundaries and norms. The glitch, by transforming the body into a non-performative one, allows for a radical reimagining of identity and self-expression. Digital artists such as LaTurbo Avedon, who exists just as a virtual avatar, and Martine Syms, who explores the intersection of identity, body, and technology in her works, express these transformative possibilities.

Following in this conversation is the consequent relation of the use of technology for amplifying human perception.

The exploration of sensory expansion spans from Rudolf Steiner’s concepts of eurythmy to contemporary practices involving sensors and motion capture. Artists like Luca Pagan and Moon Ribas extend human capabilities through technology, with Pagan playing music with the tension and distension of his muscles and Ribas having a sensor implanted in her leg to feel real-time worldwide earthquakes and amplifying a collective feeling in its own individuality, merging human perception with natural phenomena.

In the realm of gaming, Perri Karyal experiments with mind control using brainwave sensors to play game characters, this represents the potential of technology to extend our senses and capabilities and probably describes how the design of future devices will become: invisible.

PHANTASMAGORIA

Phantombra is a city-castle, no one lives in Phantombra but you can see traces of forgotten shadows.

Windows don't have glasses and the sun drew traces of time on the floor.

There are many Phantombras dislocated around but when you see a Phantombra a shiver of cold starts to run across your veins, from the feet to the head. That is the first signal to understand that you are in front of Phantombra.

When you cross the big forgotten entrance door, you see your body changing color: the skin starts to become lighter and lighter until it reaches the white and then becomes transparent, it almost becomes like a clean light water. You can feel your transparent body and then you can walk through things.

It is funny to play with the entrance, a step forward and you become water, a step back and you become meat and bones.

Sometimes in fact you see ancient hopscotch traces jump to change matter! What a beautiful game!

Once entered Phantombra your view is blinded by the darkness but when you cross the traces of the sun left on the floor, your way of seeing adapts to the light inside Phantombra.

The only living forms are dust particles flying on the surfaces of the bright canvases fixed on walls and the bricks of the castles move every time there is a transit. It looks like that a specific and special air inhabits the places of Phantombra, it's a mixture of breeze and sneeze, a fresh mountain air with hints of the past. Phantombra is the new romance, instead of the sea of ​​fog¹⁵ Phantombra hosts forgotten pasts, ghosts of shadows, silhouettes of an ancient existence that mirrors the half-deadly condition of the world¹⁶.

However what makes Phantombra alive again is the trespassing, PraÅ¡ná brána¹⁷,powder gate, Janus¹⁸, 135797531.

And now go, we have to call magicians, alchemists, astronomers and astrologers to participate.

The fusion of digital art and technology has revolutionised self-expression, fostering vibrant online communities and making creativity more accessible. While this process has introduced new challenges, such as increased social pressure and the pursuit of perfection, it has also opened up opportunities for artistic freedom and experimentation. By embracing strengths and imperfections of digital technology, contemporary artists continue to push the boundaries of what art can be, inspiring others to explore their unique creative voices. The future of digital self-expression lies in our ability to innovate sustainably, reclaim our agency through coding, and celebrate the imperfections that make us human, transforming both ourselves and the world around us in the process.

ZERO

I found a diary that I thought was lost.

By searching and looking in the infinite drawers of my dresser I rediscovered the notes I took when I was travelling from a city to a kingdom, from a country to a territory without name.

I was faster or maybe slower comparing to time and space,

I became a stone and then water and later I was both together.

I was so little that I could have a journey in my drawers;

I was so micro that I could travel inside the places made by the agglomerations of my atoms; I became so small or big that I was carbon

and I was travelling between cells and planets;

I could enter my head from my ears and have a journey in the rooms of my memories,

in the rooms of my imaginations, in the rooms of my childish remembrance,

in the rooms of utopia;

I did not have anything anymore, the only things I could trust and could be forever, were my inner spaces and ideal worlds.

I am an urbexer, a scientist, an anthropologist, a physicist, an engineer, an actor,

a director, a stone and an octopus.

I talk with you, with me, myself and both together, also with them and especially with

the inhabitants of these places.

I can change shape and adapt without being seen that much.

That is exactly what I was doing meanwhile I took my journey.

I did not want to be seen but I wanted to see, I wanted to write down some notes and

descriptions of these crazy worlds.

In the contemporary world, where everything is categorized, where the user and

consumer are ghosts walking in cities chock full of ghost architectures,

we are half dead and half alive.

I am not a writer, I am a traveller. As you.

The rule during this trip was to not have distinctions: no categories, no characters,

no narrator or interlocutor, no physics laws, no borders, no real, no unreal, no dreams,

no. That is what it is. A network communicating between the nodal points of our lives.

Adios, addio, adieu, goodbye, tot ziens.

Be water, my friend, we can be together, we can think of possible futures.

I love imagination, you are my anchor, my dear.