Do you know what digital art is? How does coding meet poetry? Why data processing could be inspirational? How does technology create new art horizons?
All of those questions and much more will be addressed on May 7 during our online dialogue with one of the leading young digital media artists Rosi Grillmair. Join SHELeader Digital Art: The New Meeting Point on Thursday at 18:00.
Until then, you can learn more about Rosi in our short 5x5 interview in which she reveals what is she passionate about and what inspires her to be a digital artist.
How would you define digital art to a three-year-old?
Digital Art has to do something with technology - finding out how things work. This is a very exciting combination! We have the art in it that lets us be free and creative and imagine anything - and technology that shows us what is possible and how to make it possible.
Imagine millions of fireflies that fly around you at night, they can even change color. All together they make up a huge dragon flying in the sky. Can you make this idea real? Yes! Program pixels on a computer screen, research real living fireflies, or invent tiny little robots that fly around you like a swarm.
Is there a message you want to transmit to the world through your art pieces?
I act as a node in a constant stream of experiences, sensory inputs, interactions, knowledge, and emotions. As an artist, I feel like weaving them and then outputting them in order to re-enter this stream. When they do, then through my own ways of telling stories. I am curious to observe how they live on and inspire others.
What is your dream project?
My dream project wants to be based on empirical research of language and collective memory. I want to work together with a research institute and trace back where our imagination of a THOUGH comes from - what is thought?; how do you imagine it?; how do I imagine it?
I want to ask people from kids-age to old-age how they imagine what a thought looks like. This will be my source material for several visual outputs of this THOUGHT which is embedded in our collective consciousness.
Do you have a great muse which inspires all your works?
These are some of the artists and researchers who inspire me + why: the way the artist Olafur Eliason honors the sources of his art, how documentary filmmaker Werner Herzog selects, and tells stories. I admire Berlin-based Mika Satomi and Hannah Perner-Wilson for their DIY inventor spirit and Saša Spačal and Maja Burja from Ljubljana for how they bring ideas naturally together in art. Saša and Argentinian artist Ana Laura Cantera continue to inspire me on how to co-create art together with the living organisms around us.
I admire Italian filmmaker Perla Sardella for her style of assembling movies into one coherent story and Rotterdam-based Romanian artistic researcher Cristina Cochior for the questions she raises on art, digital culture, and knowledge production. Thanks to them I could train my eye on alternative perspectives of our world.
What do you think the interface of the future looks like?
Plants, bacteria, and fungi are my sources of inspiration for that! Roots of plants cover big areas of land, forests communicate and regulate water supply via their root network. Fungi are able to learn and memorize their environment. When they span far enough to reach another fungus they exchange information about the land they inhabit. Bacteria have a tight-knit information system and signal processing.
I imagine our interfaces of the future to behave like the bacteria we live in symbiosis with: we link ourselves to this big network, use leaves and other plant forms for sensory inputs for the interfaces and take part in the data highway which is always present in trees, bacteria, and fungi. Instead of building our own limited infrastructure, let´s learn about the natural networks that are already existing, see how we can take part in their data exchange and learn what they need to regenerate.
SHEleader@digital 2020
SHEleader@digital is an annual international conference taking place in Sofia that provides a platform for a focused discussion on the women’s role in the digitally connected world we live in. It aims to outline solutions for attracting more women and girls to take on professional and leadership roles in the ICT and digitally empowered economy. The Conference also examines how women's authenticity and the application of female values contribute to the development of sustainable and balanced organizations with high potential and prosperous societies.
SHEleader@digital brings together key female leaders from the business sector, non-profits, and public institutions from across Europe to engage in a dialogue on how we can effectively address those challenges and more importantly, set the tone to act upon solving them.
SHEleader@digital 2020 is organized by BCWT, MOVE.BG and Ministry of Labor and Social Policy. The official partners of the event are the World Bank, Visa, Dell, VMware Bulgaria, Cisco, Progress, Uber, Lidl Bulgaria, Experian Bulgaria, HeleCloud, and Easy Consult.
Reserve your place for SHEleader@digital on September 17 and 18. Register here.
