Ground
Works

Realm of the Dead (“Realm”) is a mixed-media installation performance where the installation can also be given separately as an art exhibit. A blend of social work and arts research, Realm incorporates practice-led, engagement, and design research – visual and performance art practices actively involving both research collaborators and audiences. Grounded in social work research and content, Realm explores my life, the life of an immigrant to the United States who grew up in Brazil at the time of the military dictatorship (1964‒1985). Realm connects social work research content as it explores personal and social consequences of psychosocial issues: grief and loss, gender nonconformity, sexual orientation, and undocumented immigration status. Using critical autoethnography along with visual art and performance, in Realm, I aimed to: (1) excavate my life experiences through self-analysis; (2) develop text and artifacts (assemblage sculptures) representing those experiences, and (3) share the results as performances and art exhibits. Drawing on Popular Education – as advanced by Brazilian educator Paulo Freire (1921–1997) and by Augusto Boal (1932–2009), founder of the Theater of the Oppressed, Realm requires audience participation and fosters social transformation. Realm is based on Marília, a one-person play that was performed on Theater Row New York City where it won the United Solo Festival (2016) Best Documentary Script award. Realm represents the cemetery where Marília, my sister, who died in an accident at the age of three, was buried. Realm is my journey out of a childhood of poverty, sexual trauma, and domestic violence. Arriving undocumented in the United States in 1987, I ultimately built a life as a United States citizen and out, gender non-conforming gay “man.”

Watching and Dreaming is a body of work that enables the viewer to peer inside the “mind” of a machine to observe its perceptions, mind wanderings, and dreams. This is not a metaphorical representation of dreams, nor a technical exercise in AI such as DeepDream [1] but the realization of a computational model of dreaming informed by cognitive neuroscience. This level of description avoids biases towards Jungian and Freudian psychology that assume dreaming is exclusively human. Dreams should not be considered independently of the perceptual capacities of the dreamer, and thus comparing this model to human perceptual abilities is problematic. For the audience, these artworks function as entry-points to consider the constructed nature of perceptions and the continuity of waking, mind wandering, and dreaming. For the artist, the artworks are sites of knowledge-making; it is through the making of artistic works that the model (computational formalization) and theory (argument that situates the model in empirical knowledge) are developed. The research underlying these artworks integrates knowledge in multiple disciplinary dimensions: (a) The computational modeling of dreaming processes (Zhang 2009; Treur 2011), (b) generative and media artworks engaging with the concept of memory and dreaming (Franco 2007; Dörfelt 2011), and (c) the conception of dreaming as imagination (Nir and Tononi 2010). In this text, Watching and Dreaming (2001: A Space Odyssey) (2014) serves as an exemplar of the Watching and Dreaming body of work. The machine attempts to learn and predict Stanley Kubrick’s film 2001: A Space Odyssey through the construction of its own subjective perception that is the basis of dreaming. “Mental” images generated during perception, mind wandering, and dreaming are subjective constructions bound to the peculiarities of the machine’s way of seeing. The body of work constitutes various manifestations of the cognitive model, not attempts to communicate the model’s mechanisms.