Based on the work of the Brazilian plastic artist Diana Domingues we will present a reflexion on the imagination of the sacred in visual arts from the interpretation of themes, images, materials and formal categories which sustain contemporary language when dealing with the body in its relationship with the new communication technologies. The focus of the interpretation we offer will relate to the sense of sacred (or of that which is spiritual) in the interactive art of Diana Domingues. This sense refers to a state of widened communication and connectivity which is responsible for the expansion of the human conscience, by means of the body's experimenting the destabilization of fixed and complete worlds that is made possible by the new technologies. What is spiritual and sacred for this artistic movement is the non-essentialness of life and of human beings or life as pure connectivity. It is exactly this that becomes apparent through Domingues' device-works. Through them, this artist explores, in terms of ritual, performance and aesthetics, the interactive capacity of the new technologies in the creation of live environments and the visualization of life not as it is, but as what it can be like. What is sacred is this power gained from technology which, when activated by means of connectivity, makes human power itself to intervene in the real world and modify the environment appear. It is not the technology itself that is sacred, but the expansion of the universe parallel to the expansion of the conscience that is made possible by it, by means of widening connections between different systems. What is spiritual, then, is this constant state of transformation of conscience and human creativity to something beyond individual subjectivity, because the powers received by new technology are of an "ultra-human" order, of an "impersonal, ultra-subjective subject".
cyberart; interactivity; sacred; visual arts