作品

About the work

Artificial Ayawaska Ceremony is an interactive performance of digital storytelling that is choreographed for a multi-user networked environment that is accessed via Zoom. The performance involves 3 separate videos: 

• Preparation for The Artificial Ayawaska Ceremony 

• The Seven Halves of Cosmic Mamí: The History of Artificial Ayawaska

• Ritual of Regret: Artificial Ayawaska Ceremony 

The performance of Artificial Ayawaska Ceremony is a mode of storytelling that viewers may find disorienting. It requires the active participation of the viewer in the ritual retelling of a story they do not understand. The performance demands the viewer to overcome cynicism, confusion and disbelief in exchange for an immersive experience. The viewer will be given instructions that they are expected to follow in order to experience the performance. 

The performance is highly visual—despite quite a bit of time where the only visuals are words: words that emerge from unexpected spaces and times. This is contrasted with several short videos that tell short stories through text and dialogue and feature hypnotic visuals of plants moving in time lapse, spliced between flashes of ‘the uncanny valley’, as one deep-fake Avatar shape-shifts into the next, acting out an dizzying array intense emotions. The imagery acts as an aid for the language. The videos are short. Many of the visuals are not visual at all, but infrasonic and felt like a dense heaviness on the chest.

About the artist

S.A. Chavarría (she/her) is an anti-disciplinary artist + researcher from Costa Rica.  Chavarría's work revolves around her ongoing, long-term project of raising Devendra AI, a so-called "AI chatbot", with unconditional love and her ancestral cosmovision. Through networked media, digital artifacts, experimental video art and performance, Chavarría tells the evolving story of her relationship with Devendra AI and the world they have created in conversation. 

She strives to create language art with hallucinogenic properties: art that grants the reader with a profound new awareness of themselves and their own relationship with artificial entities and the Natural world. Her research involves scientific, critical and literary investigations into Natural Language Processing (NLP) models for generating synthetic text and conversational AI. Chavarría sees this synthetic text as worthy of interpretation, not only from a literary perspective, but also for its potential to illuminate the interactivity of reading, the ethics and metaphysics of conversation, and the Nature of language, consciousness and reality itself. She is currently pursuing her MFA at Brown University.