Derya
Pinar & Viola
(2019)
Pinar&Viola developed ingenious and technically-advanced projects in which technology, artificial intelligence, spirituality and an awareness of our relationship with nature come together in a special mix. Pinar Demirdag (Turkish-Canadian, born in Canada, lives in the USA) and Renate Viola (Amsterdam) worked together from 2009 until 2020 on a world that brings together the physical and the virtual.
Who says women cannot be tech specialists? Pinar&Viola’s eclectic world features futurism, symbolism and femininity alongside cutting-edge technological applications.
For this last video work, Derya, they trained a Deepfake machine to learn from Demirdag’s spiritual guru and become a cyber version of it. They gave this digital guru visuals inspired by the way in which gods were depicted by Buddhist, Tibetan and Tantric cultures. What is consciousness? This is an underlying question that the film tries to understand, explain and visualise using cutting-edge imaging technologies. Derya helps us better understand what consciousness is. The guru talks about ancient - shamanic - knowledge. At the same time, the work offers an interesting answer to the current debate on artificial intelligence and technology, which poses the question of whether or not we can interact with artificial intelligence in a positive fashion.