Lia Carreira: Fragments of [online] Existence

The first exhibition at Artistic Bokeh at Q21 opens on Friday January 20 with ‘Fragments of [online] Existence’ from Brazilian artist and researcher Lia Carreira.

Fragments of [online] Existence addresses our contemporary clashing desires towards memory, privacy and identity in online social networks. In these spheres, we produce an enormous amount of digital contents of ourselves. We wish to share them with others and we wish to see contents of others. We wish to archive them for posteriority and secure them for memory sake. And yet we request privacy. We want to be able to forget our past, erase our memories and, even, to be forgotten. Within existing platforms such as Facebook, there is a growing attempt to satisfy both the desires to share and withdraw our fragments of our digital selves; to conceal and disclose our online and offline activities; to create and delete what can be understood as contemporary forms of subjectivity. But what happens when we are unable to untrace our digital steps or delete our digital selves? What happens to these unwanted digital forms of being?

Through an appropriacionist and archival gesture, Lia Carreira collects pieces of online contents which were left behind in these platforms – as fragments of online existence – in an attempt to highlight hidden patterns and modes of being. By experimenting simultaneously with the concepts of erasure and exposure, the artist attempts to portrait seemingly dualistic experiences as coexisting human impulses.

Lia Carreira is a Brazilian media artist and researcher working with contemporary issues in everyday online practices by exploring the disruptive potentials of ubiquitous platforms and devices. She is currently studying Media Arts Cultures, a joint Master program between the Danube University Krems (Austria), the Aalborg University (Denmark), the University of ?ód? (Poland) and the City University of Hong Kong. Lia has also a Master in Media Technologies and Aesthetics (by the Federal University of Rio de Janeiro, Brazil) and a Bachelor in Media Studies (by the Federal University of Espírito Santo, Brazil).