Marcos Serafim wants to make sense out of the senseless when it comes to how we process data and information with his art installation called “Membrana Semipermeable: Data, the ongoing HIV/AIDS Crisis and the U.S.-Mexico Border.”
“My main goals are to make a sensible set of entangled membranes … as the virus can penetrate the geographic borders and the digital membranes that structure our lives.”
Serafim is a Brazilian artist, documentarist, and assistant professor of art in Photography, Video and Imaging for the School of Art. He works with audiovisual media across theatrical exhibitions and installations.
He has exhibited work at the 5th and 6th Ghetto Biennale in Haiti; Oscar Niemeyer Museum in Brazil; The Experimental Media and Performing Arts Center (EMPAC); the Queens Museum and Flux Factory in New York. His art was also screened at Cine Esquema Novo Film Festival in Brazil, the Northampton Film Festival in Massachusetts, Faito Doc Festival in Italy, doclisboa in Portugal, Courant/Immersity 3D in France, and San Francisco Cinematheque’s Crossroads in the USA.
“I’m trying to understand how we deal with technology and data in regard to ethnicity, queerness, and health,” he said. “A piece of data that is scientific and that shows us part of a reality and of how we organize socially can be easily distorted and misunderstood.”
Immersive audiovisual and data visualization project
Membrana Semipermeable: Data, the ongoing HIV/AIDS Crisis and the US-Mexico Border is an audiovisual signal flow and data visualization project, including a series of videos and immersive installations.
“We need to understand how technology is influencing our lives and at the same time, why are we not looking at the data that shows that we have an epidemic targeted to specific bodies and targeting responses to that,” Serafim said.
Membrana semipermeable explores the subjectivities of a queer person living with HIV in the US/Mexico borderlands and the effect of information technologies.
“I’m able to create images based on data banks and data that’s all around the internet and that forms our imaginaries and our ways of thinking about disease, about HIV, and about queer Latinx bodies, which is sort of the focus of this project,” he said.
Creative coding to create images
Serafim says he departs from data found in state reports and uses creative coding to create images for larger sets of data, distancing himself from numbers and a straightforward visualization into a space of feeling and experience.
“I use those numbers and this digital system that allows me to visualize them to generate and transform images that explore subjectivity,” he said.
Another way that Serafim uses technology to create images is through artificial intelligence. The images created are based on how big data and society views someone living with HIV.
“I also see the content generated with the AI, working as some sort of digital visualization,” Serafim said. “It allows us to see what is this imaginary, this collective way of thinking that sees the person living with HIV, or more specifically the queer Latinx person living with HIV.”
HIV in the Borderlands
In addition to data visualization, the installation have several interactive components. He said he gathers some type of movement or reaction from the audiences to mix with the images and shows interviews of people living with HIV in the Borderlands being asked about risk tests and examinations.
“I’m creating a space where people can experience different channels and units of images and information,” Serafim said.
Audiences can also stop by a screen and watch themselves become the next person living with HIV, powered by artificial intelligence.
“So anytime you stop by, it’s never going to be the same and you’re always going to see a different thing in a space where all of that is coexisting,” he said.
When creating this installation, learning and dealing with technology was his biggest challenge.
Using computer science to make art
“I’m using computer science to make art without having studied computer science…I oftentimes have to work with collaborators in computer science or artists who are more versed in these technologies to get my point across,” he said.
Serafim continued to say he also had to deal with censorship while using certain AI programs to generate images.
“I couldn’t even generate an image of a syringe being inserted into a human body because it was censored by certain commercial tools,” he said. “How would that inform how we think and see in the future?”
Serafim hopes that people can sense its impact that they do not see in their everyday lives and create a parallel between the virus and the viral.
Living with a virus
“I’m trying to make the viewer see that it’s impenetrable, that’s that membrane…and with that, entering a space, seeing yourself merging with digital technology in the context of disease and feeling what living with a virus is and its social implications,” he said.
To help with the installation, Serafim has applied and received grant money from the University of Arizona’s HSI Faculty Seed Grant Program from Research, Innovation & Impact and HSI Initiatives for three years.
“This is great…it’s just incredible to be able to have support and do a project that critically questions so many things that I care about,” he said.
Serafim will be showcasing another output of Membrana Semipermeable: Data, the ongoing HIV/AIDS Crisis and the US-Mexico Border in Tucson during the fall semester. It’s an audiovisual installation and performance piece where he will be generating images in real time.
Dark undertones
As he continues to work on his installation, he said that there are some dark undertones. He thinks that technology in art is a philosophical tool that provokes people to think about the world.
“There’s some darkness to it…but it’s all based on trying to create this feeling and bring people to these thoughts,” he said. “Life is not all happiness all the time either and I feel like the more we are able to face our own darkness, our own fears, the more we’re going to act on them and make changes.”