I am a media artist working with experimental practices in live performance, sound and video. My work reflects upon notions of reality as presented by the natural sciences, especially radio astronomy, neuroscience and space research. The aim of my work is to create cinematic and highly subjective experiences in the mind of the participants, that generate memories which continue to be re-interpreted over time. My projects aim at resonating with different conceptual and existential meanings according to the experiential heritage of each participant and their perception of reality, reaching for a culturally and socially diverse audience.
Mare Incognito (performance, film, 2022) - Mare Incognito is an interdisciplinary project by media artist Daniela de Paulis. Mare Incognito explores the gradual dissolution of consciousness and of the thinking process while falling asleep. We are especially interested in exploring the moment during the sleep cycle while awareness seems to dissolve and while the self gradually detaches from the continuous life narrative. The perceived loss of consciousness during sleep is the only moment in daily life when the thinking process gradually shreds into an unfathomable void, an experience possibly similar to the moments of dying. Mare Incognito poetically explores and draws reflection upon the process of dying as a daily experience in human life. In the performance, we conceptually link the dissolution and symbolic death of the self as experienced during deep sleep with the darkness, coldness and vacuum of outer space and explore how such immeasurable forms of space and emptiness might poetically resonate with each other. The title of the work hints at a journey into the obscure oceans of inner and outer space. http://somnospace.diejungeakademie.de/
The Dream of Scipio (video installation, 2018-2022) - This is an ongoing project, partly developed as part of the 'Exploded View' project by Krien Clevis, set at the Parco Regionale dell'Appia Antica. The work delves into 'The Dream of Scipio' (Somnium Scipionis), a section of 'On the Republic', a literary dialogue on Roman politics, written in six volumes by Cicero. 'The text was rightly seen as a condensation of important ideas from ancient philosophy and cosmology by scholars in the middle ages. Scholars now recognize it as a superb example of a popular meditation technique widely practiced in different schools of classical philosophy, and known today as the 'View from Above'. For this piece, I will recreate the first flight in history over ancient Rome, in the Parco Archeologico di Centocelle, a section of the Parco Regionale dell'Appia Antica. The original flight was demonstrated by the Wright Brothers on the 15 April 1909 and documented as part of the first aerial footage in history.
For the flight, I will use a replica of the 'Flyer' used by the Wright Brothers, and the runaway
running through the park.
The Metamorphosis of a Periplaneta Americana (performance) - On 15 April 2020 I transmitted into space the neural activity of a locust and a cockroach recorded by the research team lead by Prof. Amil Ayali at the University of Tel Aviv. I visited the lab at the university in 2014 to conduct some research on the neural recording of insects. The sound recording of the neural activity was sent into space by the radio operators of the Bochum Radio Observatory in Germany. The Metamorphosis is the follow up stage of my ongoing project COGITO in Space The title of the work is borrowed from Frank Kafka's novel in which his fictional character one day wakes up as an insect and experience reality through an alienated body and sensory system. The novel provides an impressive example of a human speculating about the experience of life and reality from the perspective of another living being.
A Sign in Space (Light installation, 2016) - Commissioned for the New Realism exhibition at Science Park in Amsterdam, A Sign in Space is my second work inspired by Italo Calvino’s Cosmicomics. The work reflects upon the process leading to the production of visual representations of cosmic phenomena. The images selected for the piece represent the centre of the Milky Way, first captured by the Swift satellite and then cleansed of defects caused by the satellite’s mechanical failures and degradation over time.
Here the images, meant to represent concrete celestial phenomena, yet cleansed of any sign of physical occurrence in time and of any spatial reference, are shown as exercise of pure mental abstraction, as windows into the void, with white signs floating onto it. The title of the work alludes to the almost surreal, yet distinctly human tension of finding one’s place within the infinity of the cosmos by tracing deliberate, yet meaningless, signs onto the void.
COGITO in Space (performance, 2013-2018) - Abstract. COGITO in Space is an experiential narrative sending thoughts into outer space as radio waves. The project exists both as a mobile installation and as performative event staged inside the cabin of the Dwingeloo radio telescope in The Netherlands. For both versions of the project, a team composed by three neuroscientists prepare the subject with a lab grade electroencephalogram (EEG) device and a virtual reality (VR) headset, showing an experimental video of the Earth seen from space. The brain activity stimulated by the video is recorded and simultaneously transmitted into space in real time, using the antenna of the Dwingeloo radio telescope.
Writing on the Moon - Writing on the Moon is inspired by Italo Calvino's novel Cosmicomics and in particular by its first chapter,
The Distance of the Moon. The video shows words 'literally' falling off the Moon's surface, as suggested by the novel, which takes scientific facts and builds imaginative stories around them. The words, converted into sound
tones and transmitted to the Moon as radio waves by a station in Brazil, are reflected by the Lunar surface, received by the Dwingeloo radio telescope in The Netherlands and displayed while they return from the long journey, creating a poetic visual cascade, in a playful act of free associations. The distortion of the letters is caused by the long distance travelled by the radio waves (approximately 800.000 Km) and by the rocky and uneven Moon's surface, which scatters the radio signals all around the space, as they touch its ground. The words, which can be read
vertically, symbolically echo the special Moon condition described in the novel, for which objects simply fall from the Lunar surface, onto Earth.....
OPTICKS - OPTICKS borrows its name from the pivotal essay by Isaac Newton on the reflection and refraction of colours.
OPTICKS is a networked live performance during which digital images submitted by the public are sent to the moon as radio signals, using several antennas around the globe. The performance is streamed on the web in real time and includes a panel of artists and scientists gathering and talking around the topic of the Moon, while the images are sent to the Moon and back in real time. The performance has been presented since 2009 and brings together radio operators, scientists and the general public from around the world.
Moon Relay - The video installation shows images of nuclear explosions reflected by the Moon's surface, using the technology 'Visual Moonbounce', developed in 2009 by Daniela de Paulis during her residency at the Dwingeloo radio telescope in The Netherlands. The images have been sent to the Moon as radio signals by a station in Brazil and, after being reflected by the Moon's surface, have been received by the Dwingeloo radio telescope and reconverted in the original images. The evident distortion of the images is caused by the great distance travelled by the signals, approximately 768.000 Kilometres.
In the exhibition setting the images are projected in large scale, in order to emphasize their hallucinatory content and saturated colours, by overstating their distortion.
le Voyage dans la Lune - 'le Voyage dans la Lune' is a video work inspired by the homonymous B/W film by French director George Méliès. The animation is composed by 26 Moon-reflected images of the Lunar phases kindly provided by Michael Oates (Manchester Astronomical Society). On the 20 September 2011, the 26 images were sent to the Moon in a sequence (one after the next) as radio signals by Bruce Hàlasz, a radio amateur in Brazil; the radio signals, reflected by the Moon's surface and scattered all over the Space, were partly received by at Dwingeloo radio telescope, a 25 meters dish in The Netherlands. The original signals traveled approximately 768.000 Kilometers, the distance to the Moon and back, losing some data on the way, thus giving the Moon-reflected images a 'noisy' and very unique appearance.
Blue Marble - Blue Marble is a video work commissioned and presented as part of the official reopening ceremony of the Dwingeloo radio telescope, on 5 April 2014.
The video is realized with the technology Visual Moonbounce, developed by the artist during her residency at the Dwingeloo radio telescope. For this video, the original Blue Marble image was sent to the Moon as radio waves by a station in Italy and received as reflection of the Moon's surface by the Dwingeloo radio telescope in The Netherlands. The process was repeated eleven times, until the original image faded away into entropy. The distortion of the image is caused by the long distance travelled by the radio waves, approximately 800.000 Km for each journey to the Moon and back. In this work the radio waves travelled approximately 8.000.000 Km in total.
