Tina Gonsalves

Gonsalves’ (http://www.tinagonsalves.com) creative investigation integrates Art, Science and Technology to create embodied interactive audiovisual experiences, discovering new ways of experiencing the internal body and the external environments, using painting, animation and interactivity to explore complex emotional landscapes.

The theme; ‘externalising the internal - revealing what lay beneath the skin’, has threaded Gonsalves’ artistic investigations. From 1995 to 2001, Gonsalves worked with diagnostic imaging departments of hospitals within Australia, gaining access to diagnostic imaging machines and resulting imagery. Her work evolved over this period from interpretative representations of the body using diagnostic imaging to exploring complex emotional landscapes using moving imagery and sound.

In 2002, Gonsalves pursued research to explore how her artwork could probe the audiences’ emotional body. She investigated the use of bio-metric sensors as triggers for emotional video narratives, leading to both more immersive installations, as well as intimate ubiquitous works. Gonsalves’ work in mobile and wearable technology investigates ways of using these technologies to creating new, more empathic social interactions. Her projects often attempt to disrupt codes of social behaviours, with an agenda to create more intimate and ‘authentic’ communication between each other (“Medulla Intimata” 2004; collaborator Tom Donsaldson, “Tryst “2006/2007). Currently, Gonsalves’ is leading international workshops for Nokia Design, Helsinki. The focus is on the development of more empathic, creative and intimate interaction scenarios for mobile media. In 2007 Gonsalves lead international workshops for Nokia Design, Helsinki, based at Venice International University. The focus was on the development of more empathic, creative and intimate interaction scenarios for mobile media.

Searching for more empirical foundations to the emotional cues that drive her work, in 2005, she initiated a collaboration with affective neuroscientist, Dr. Hugo Critchley and was awarded an Arts and Humanities Research Council /Arts Council England Arts and Science fellowship. Through her role as Artist in Resident at the Institute of Neurology, UCL London, she is investigating the mechanisms through which emotions are triggered and shaped. Critchley’s neuroscientific interests focus on the brain and emotion mechanisms by which human social and motivational behaviour is controlled. Critchley and Gonsalves are discerning the physiological signatures of emotional states to create software and artwork that recognize and respond to internal emotions.

IIn 2007 she was awarded the Wellcome Large Art Award, Synapse Residency from the Network for Art and Technology and the Liminal Screen Coproduction at the Banff Center to produce CHAMELEON: Over two years Gonsalves will work with the Affective Computing Group, MIT (USA), Wellcome Trust Centre for Neuroimaging (UK) and Brighton & Sussex Medical School (UK) on "Chameleon", which draws upon earlier work developed in partnership with Nueroscientist, Professor Chris Frith and Professor Hugo Critchley.The project is curated by SCAN. CHAMELEON synthesizes neuroscientific and affective computing research to explore and provoke emotional processes by producing emotionally responsive audiovisual narratives. The work highlights awareness of our inner selves, as well as our innate tendency to synchronise and connect with others.Over the project she will continue her role as honorary artist in resident at the The Wellcome Trust Centre for Neuroimaging, University College London, UK. She will begin her role as visiting artist at the MIT Affective Computing Lab, USA.

Her work has exhibited/screened extensively including the PowerHouse Museum, AU; Banff Centre for the Arts; CYNETART 06; Whitechapel gallery, UK; Siggraph, USA; ISEA ; Artsway, UK; IAMAS, Japan; The Australian Centre For Photography, AU; Barbican, UK; Pompidou Centre, France; DEAF 2004; ICA, UK and was a featured artist representing the ACMI at the Melbourne Art Fair.

Her works have been awarded with fellowships and grants extensively. She has taken part in many Artist in Residence programs including The Banff New Media Institute in Canada, the Centre for Contemporary Art in Prague, Asialink artist in residence at the New Media faculty Chulalongkorn University, Thailand, (Pro) duction residency at Artsway, the Advanced Institute of Media Arts and Sciences residency in Japan, the AHRC/ACE Arts and Sciences Research Fellowship, UK. Her music videos for labels BMG, EMI, and Festival Mushroom Records have been frequently televised worldwide. 

Artist Statement

My work has always explored aspects of the intimacies and vulnerabilities of being human. Most of us go through life hiding our wounds and vulnerabilities, or trying as best we can to conceal them. Through the use of video, sound and technology, my work often tries to expose the fragilities, looking at the emotions and feelings often felt when we become exposed.

Nothing seems as private as the bodily experience of raw emotion. Emotions are a common thread that every human being can read, understand, and share. Emotions influence all aspect of behaviour and subjective experience; grabbing attention, enhancing or blocking memories and swaying logical thought. Emotions spread in social collectives almost by contagion. In cohesive social interactions, we are highly attuned to subtle and covert emotional signals, Our behaviours often mirror each other in minute detail. At times, we may voluntarily suppress our emotional reactions, temporarily disguising our intentions or vulnerability, though ‘true’ emotions are nevertheless evident in a pattern of internal bodily responses that set an underlying tone for behaviour. It is these internal emotion responses that I am currently investigating with affective neuroscientist Dr. Hugo Critchley and through my role as AHRC research fellow and artist in resident at the Institute of Cognitive Neuroscience and Functional Imaging Laboratory at UCL, London.

Together, we are creating video installations (FEEL SERIES 2006/2007) that respond to the emotional feelings of the audience. Using a range of cues, (for example sweat, heart rate, breath, prosody, movement, facial emotion recognition, temperature shifts) we are discerning the physiological signatures of emotional states to create software that recognize and respond to subtle changes in the body. We are then creating potent emotional narratives that create engender emotional changes in the body. These are tested in the lab for their salient effect on the body. As the emotional language of the body creates the narratives of the work itself, we are tapping into ideas of bio-feed-back. As the audience adjusts their internal body, they adjust the video that surrounds them. Seeing, feeling and interacting with the work allows viewers to gain a personal insight and perspective to their emotional reactions. We are then interested in ways of influencing the emotional state of the audience, entraining different feeling states within the viewer. For example, how can you bring someone from sadness to happiness?

When an audience member participates in my video installation work, I want them to become very much aware of themselves. I want them to become sensitive to themselves; their breathing, their voice, their conversation, their sweating, their emotional responses. I am interested in creating art experiences that allow the audience to have a more intimate relationship with their own body, to feel more, to notice the fragilities, to expose more.

It has usually been in my most vulnerable moments when I have truly felt the joy of others, and also true fear of life and all it offers. My senses are highlighted. The feeling of vulnerability elicits a very visceral reaction in my body. A knot builds in my stomach, my heart speeds up, I feel a little faint, hands begin to tremble, voice quavers, face flushes. Feeling of tightness rise in my throat. Tears well up in my eyes, and tumble down my cheeks. I can no longer disguise my emotional state. My autonomous nervous system exposes it for all to see. All who surround me are now confronted with my emotions. Some people pretend not to notice. Other people try to make it go away. My work often tries to highlight how we deal with emotions in social environments. “Medulla Intimata” (2004; collaborator Tom Donaldson) , is a sensor based digital video jewellery prototype that monitors the wearer’s internal emotional state by using prosody. Video self portraiture is transmitted realtime to the screen of the jewellery in response to the emotional tone of the wearers voice. Through video, the wearer reveals more than they usually might, and repressed and hidden emotions leak into the world of polite conversation. The jewellery changed the way people interacted. When people communicated me, they felt my jewellery was very vulnerable, so therefore in return, people began to have more intimate, deeper and more creative conversations.

I enjoy Joseph Beuys comment about what it was to be an artist. “You weren’t showing your magnificence and your wealth of ideas and your huge creativity, you were showing your vulnerability. And it was your vulnerability that people picked up on, the perception of your vulnerability as a person and as an artist that sparked the creativity in other people”.

At one time or another, we are vulnerable, all scared. I create work that attempts to allow us to become more sensitive to our feelings. If we embraced vulnerability would we become more compassionate, more creative, more present?

photo credits: Petr Matas Stehno (-123 minute band, Prague)