The theme for the 11th edition of the mObgraphia Awards held in Brazil is “ANCESTRAL FUTURE”. The winning works, shown in the Museum of Image and Sound in São Paolo, highlight the value of knowledge acquired in the past.
This contest aimed to stimulate image production through mobile platforms (mobgraphy) in order to create a dialogue about this new form of communication through mobile photography.
Using the productive and creative features of current technologies, entrants were asked to depict how traditions can be valuable when looking to the future. A connection was proposed between cultural roots and the values passed down by previous generations, and present and future life.
Looking at the speed of contemporary society, participants were asked to reflect on ancestral heritage that has been preserved.
The exhibition “ANCESTRAL FUTURE" seeks to reconcile the past and the present, valuing traditional knowledge as a guide for overcoming current challenges in society, to lead to the creation of a more sustainable, ethical, moral, and balanced future.
I entered the Digital Art category of this Mobile Photo Festival 2024. Out of the many images entered, these were narrowed down to ten. Then the final five were announced with the knowledge that these were the works that would be exhibited.
At the opening ceremony the winners of each category were announced. I am truly honoured and excited to announce that my entry “Strength” was chosen as the winner of the “Arte Digital” category.
This year mObgraphia entered the metaverse, and so although I was unable to attend the event in São Paolo, I was able to watch the event shown live in Art CIty in the Spatial metaverse and celebrate with friends from all over the world.
Updated: Mar 26
Maro Dori Sky Palace is one of the architectural wonders of the Spatial Metaverse. This celestial gallery showcases the imaginary, noble bird Maro Dori, a creation of a special, young Japanese artist Michiko, paired with the captivating, seasonal Kyoto photos of Fumio Kojima. The result is a blend of tradition and modernity.
This beautiful, virtual environment features floating bridges that allow users to walk through a sequence of gallery spaces and connect with others along the way.
Imagine my excitement when I was invited to have a solo exhibition in one of the galleries.
Many of you know that I love architecture and spent many years photographing the architecture of Dubai, so to be invited to exhibit in this architecturally unique Japanese virtual space was very special.
Because of the many floating bridges in the space and because I believe that architecture is in itself a bridge, as it has the ability to move people emotionally, I was inspired to call this exhibition, “Bridging Worlds”.
My artworks in this exhibition feature people from various parts of the world, and invite us to walk in the shoes of those who have worldviews different to our own. We are invited to bridge our differences and instead realize our similarities and our interconnectedness..
The figures in the artworks invite us to follow them and move along a bridge from the outer world to the inner world of contemplation. As much as there is a sense of stillness in movement in the artworks, there is also a sense of movement into stillness.
The exhibition is also a celebration of the many bridges that I have already crossed on my explorations in the metaverse.
My collaboration with the Japanese community in Spatial has enabled us to bridge language barriers by researching and discovering modern speech to text technology.
As a result of implementing this technology which facilitates communication, people who are hard of hearing are now able to feel fully included in the metaverse. Different speaking communities in the metaverse are also communicating more easily with each other, uniting us all.
Time zones are no longer a barrier as the metaverse has encouraged us to bridge this challenge.
Many of our artworks are both physical and digital, the metaverse being the bridge to the phygital.
Someone expressed to me recently that the metaverse is a bridge which enables them to be both social in the virtual realm and yet solitary in the physical realm at the same time.
As we continue to connect in the metaverse we are building bridges. Dr Judi Harris put it so beautifully:
“When I see cyberspace, I see bridges. Perhaps I should say I see people, building bridges in cyberspace. Not bridges of steel, not even electronic bridges, but bridges of ideas that span the miles of physical space, cross the generations and connect people who would otherwise be unlikely ever to meet.”
You, dear reader, are invited to join me in the Maro Dori Sky Palace and to cross bridges you had not before thought were possible.
Bridging Worlds: 1 April 2024 - 31 May 2024
A Japanese version of this blog post has been published here.
There will be a cherry blossom viewing and exhibition celebration on 1 April 2024 at 10PM JST/9AM EST/3PM CET in Ambient Canvas. Experience a Japanese style hangout with Koto music, before joining me on a journey to "Bridging Worlds".
Updated: Mar 9
Thank you very much for the opportunity to be part of this amazing event for the second year.
My iPhone artworks are a combination of photography, painting and digital manipulation. When photographing with my iPhone, I use a slow shutter technique, focussing on the energetic content that fills a space. In other words, I intuitively focus not on material mass but rather on the energy emanating from my subjects. Using apps, I paint on the photographs on my iPhone screen using my finger, and then use a variety of other apps to create further textures and blends. The figures in my artworks invite personal reflection.
A few words about my artwork “Transformation”
Many of us think we live in the Information age but we don’t. In the Information age we moved from the telegraph to the radio to the television to the personal computer to the world wide web. For the first time in history, we became the first self aware species in the known universe, who is interconnected to every other member of its species on a single planetary biosphere. With this came a huge sense of overload, accompanied by so many crises.
We have exited the Information Age, and in a time of massive chaos, have entered the Transformation age. We are seeing rapid technological advances and digital transformation.
Transformation, my artwork exhibited in this showcase, and viewable on my avatar thanks to custom avatar creator @Lisbet_Spatial, is an invitation. It is an invitation to live a transformational life. It is a call to value interactions with others with the same intensity that we seek to interact with the technological tools at our disposal. It is a call to go inward. It is a call to become discerning, mindful, sustainable and humble. To move beyond fear for your own life, to move beyond fear of that which is different, to move from looking at the other as an object to looking as the other and relating to them empathetically. If we are to survive, we will need to transform and expand our capacity to love.