Self as Montage: Contemplating Consciousness through Moving Image

Join us on Thursday, June 4th, at 2pm at the AD&A Museum for “Self as Montage in Latent Space: Contemplating Consciousness through Moving Image”, a guided walkthrough and discussion of artist Vivek Karthikeyan’s immersive expanded cinema installation as part of the MFA Thesis Exhibition “Faultlines” (May 23 – June 7). Faculty from across UCSB will share their reflections on Vivek’s work and discuss how it relates to their respective areas of research. Moderated by the artist himself, this interdisciplinary conversation will include faculty from departments including Psychology & Brain Sciences, Religious Studies, Germanic & Slavic Studies, and Media Arts and Technology, each drawing from their areas of expertise to engage with the themes of the installation.

Combining the immersive capabilities of XR (extended reality) technology, generative computational logic, and experimental time-and-lens based work, Vivek’s installation draws on film theorist Gene Youngblood’s notion of expanded cinema to explore the experience of embodied, phenomenological human consciousness. Modern cognitive psychology, generative imaging, new media art theory, and esoteric South Asian meditation practices all fuse together into a speculative artistic investigation into the idea of a fundamental “unformedness” at the heart of conscious experience.

This event is free and open to the public. Presented with support from AD&A Museum. The exhibition is on view until June 7th.

Vivek Karthikeyan is an interdisciplinary moving image artist-researcher and MFA candidate in the Dept of Art at UCSB working at the intersection of film & video, computational media, and installation. Formally trained in cinematography, Vivek has apprenticed with leading Indian independent filmmakers and documentarians, working on independent features, documentaries, experimental shorts, and video art projects in India, South Korea, and the US. His current research focuses on the emerging poetics of a transmodernist experimental moving image praxis, inspired by Indian avant garde cinema traditions such as Cinema of Prayoga, pre-modern South Asian philosophical thought, and new media architectures.