This doctoral project investigates distance—temporal, spatial, affective—as a poetic, epistemic, and material site of, in, and for transmedia art practice. Emerging from the failure of representation in regimes of extraction and measurement, the research explores distance not as a gap to be bridged, but as a dynamic and generative space of transformation. Drawing from and expanding Félix Guattari’s three ecologies—the intimate, the social, and the environmental—the project grounds transmedia practice through three transversal methodologies: translation, transduction, and transmediation. These interlaced processes move across language and space, enabling situated, embodied, and relational forms of knowing to emerge.
Departing from the ontological indeterminacy engendered by loss (the abyss), the project explores the poetics of distance as a condition of imagination and interconnectedness. Within an intimate ecology, it traces affective distances—grief, memory, desire—through translation as an embodied act. Within a social ecology, transduction addresses mediated distances shaped by technology, geopolitics, and epistemic othering. In an environmental ecology, transmediation retunes perception to more-than-human signals, crafting experimental formats that sense techno-ecological distances beyond anthropocentric frames.
Variantology of Distance proposes a transversal methodology for artistic research—one that listens through distance and translates its tensions. Across these ecologies, transmedia art practice becomes a mode of inquiry that doesn’t seek to resolve distance, but to inhabit it by making its intervals, translations, and resonances sensible. How can distance be both aesthetically and epistemologically understood not as separation, but as a material and affective site of artistic inquiry? How might artistic research reclaim technologies of mediation to sense, expose, or inhabit distances that resist capture by dominant regimes of representation, extraction, and measurement? And ultimately, how can such a 'variantology of distance' contribute to new modes of knowledge production that are situated, plural, and ecologically oriented?
Luiz Zanotello is an artist, researcher, and educator investigating transversal ecologies between language, the environment, and the (post-)digital.
Often taking the form of transmedia installations, his practice unfolds through research and writing vis-à-vis the revising of old and devising of new media to evidence a critical shift in affect and time. Through his artistic research, he seeks to sense and provoke a new poetics for the technologically mediated present and its ecological compass from a warm, pluriversal perspective.
His work has been shown in institutions such as the Museum of Contemporary Art in Zagreb, Museum of Applied Arts Vienna, Personal Structures Biennial in Venice, Technische Sammlungen Dresden, Städtische Galerie Karlsruhe, FILE Festival São Paulo, Cidade das Artes in Rio de Janeiro, among others.
With an MA in Digital Media from HfK Bremen and a BA in design from the São Paulo State University, he is currently a PhD candidate in Artistic Research at the PhDArts program in collaboration with the HfK Bremen, with a doctoral scholarship from the Studienstiftung des deutschen Volkes.
He was Assistant Professor for New Media at the UdK Berlin for six years and a guest lecturer for Artistic Research in Media Art at the HfK Bremen. He is a former DAAD fellow, a Petra & Dieter Frese Stiftung Preis awardee, and a former artistic resident of the European Media Art Platform and the Akademie Schloss Solitude.