Dissemination

Juliana Wexel, Bruno Mendes da Silva, and Mirian Tavares participate in the 15th International Avanca Cinema Conference

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Under the title “Artificial Intelligence in Audiovisual Narratives: Experience on the Cyberperformance Aretusa Vox and vulva art“, the presentation will explore aesthetic issues surrounding the use of artificial intelligence in audiovisual narratives. The discussion focuses on collaborative creation processes between humans and machines within the realm of digital media art and the rise of AI Art from the perspective of digital feminism, rooted in cyberfeminism. The presentation will take place on Saturday, July 27, from 10:30 AM to 12:30 PM.

During the event, Juliana Wexel, an FCT-CIAC research fellow and PhD candidate in digital media art (DMAD-CIAC), will share her experience creating the video art piece “squirt.Metamorphosis”. This work is based on 3D generative animation developed using the online software Stable Diffusion and is part of the digital artifact Aretusa Vox. The aesthetic discourse of squirt.Metamorphosis evokes female pleasure and sexual autonomy as disruptive tools against the violence and patriarchal domination of women’s and vulva-owners’ sexuality. Aretusa Vox is one of the computational projects developed as part of Wexel’s ongoing doctoral research, titled “Vulva Art and Cyberperformative: Contributions to the Understanding of Feminist Aesthetic Discourses in Digital Media Art”. The Aretusa Vox communication is an autofictional cyberperformance developed from a cyberfeminist perspective that engages with the myth of Arethusa, as narrated by the nymph in Book V of Ovid’s Metamorphoses, concerning the ancient freshwater spring on the small island of Ortigia, Sicily, Italy. Traditionally depicted in literary canons and popular culture as a love story between the nymph Arethusa and Alpheus, in Aretusa Vox, the myth is reinterpreted as an attempted rape. The cyberperformance serves both as the outcome and the developmental process of the CyberPerformanCity method, designed for creating artistic intervention projects and artifacts that mediate between urban and digital spaces.

As a result, the work offers advancements in understanding the logic of algorithmic syntax for generating specific artistic images and, within the field of cyberfeminism, frames them as creations within the vulva art movement. Aretusa Vox was developed under the CyPeT project, funded by the Portuguese Foundation for Science and Technology, and was presented during the Cyberperformance Symposium: Artistic and Pedagogical Practices, marking the final stage of the CyPeT project. Aretusa Vox weaves together the artistic research of the investigator within CyPeT and theoretical-practical experiences as a member of Writing Urban Places. The full performance of Aretusa Vox can be viewed on the CIACMedia YouTube channel via this link: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=5ls_Q8yMObg&t=2171s.

ARETUSA hydro_VOX was selected to participate in the international competition at the 28th AVANCA Film Festival 2024

Aretusa Vox culminates in the final version “ARETUSA hydro_VOX, an autofictional cyberbook.” The audiovisual narrative of ARETUSA hydro_VOX, also authored by Juliana Wexel, has been selected to represent Portugal in the “experimental video” category at the international competition of the 28th AVANCA 2024. The work was screened on July 25 at the Parish Auditorium of Avanca, Portugal, and competes in the same category as productions from countries like Germany and Iran.

The winners will be announced on Sunday, July 28, during the festival’s closing ceremony.

The full lineup of films competing in this and other categories at the festival can be found [here].