At the center of this research is a question of poetic distance. If “poetry is the shortest distance between two humans” (Ferlinghetti), then the way technology tends to flatten time and space threatens not only the poetic but also the very possibility of relation. In this study, I seek to develop a kind of media practice that challenges this tendency. I argue that to sense and engage with the spatial complexities posed by post-digital and post-colonial conditions, a transversal poetics between intimate, social, and environmental ecologies is needed.
The starting point of this research is my own experience as a mourner, a migrant, and a media artist, as perspectives to investigate each of the three ecologies. By means of a methodological variation of spatial distance, I create process-based installations, texts, and performative readings to articulate these positions and their crossings. At each variation, I develop site-specific media practices as a means of generating new questions and insights. Through these processes, I explore methods of moving across and beyond (trans-) media and space, nature and culture, intimacy and distance.
'A Variantology of Distance', therefore, examines the epistemic space of transmedia art practice. It does so by tracing the crossings between intimate, social, and environmental ecologies from a situated perspective. In this context, it asks: how is meaning shaped by the binding of poetic and spatial distance? How might transmedia practices generate insights across their ecological registers? What ethical and aesthetic implications emerge in doing so?
Luiz Zanotello is an artist, researcher, and educator born in Brazil and based in Berlin. Through transmedia art practice, he investigates poetic tensions between space, language, and ecology within the post-digital condition. His work moves across artistic research, writing, lecturing, and teaching, fostering transversal dialogues at the intersections of art, science, and technology from a warm, pluriversal perspective.
His artistic work has been presented at institutions such as the Museum of Contemporary Art in Zagreb, the Museum of Applied Arts in Vienna, and FILE Festival São Paulo, among others worldwide. His academic writing has appeared in the Journal for Artistic Research (JAR), Revista V!RUS (USP São Paulo), and other publications. He is a former DAAD fellow and has participated in several artistic residencies, including the European Media Art Platform and Akademie Schloss Solitude.
Zanotello was Assistant Professor for New Media at the Berlin University of the Arts (UdK Berlin), and a guest lecturer at the University of the Arts Bremen (HfK Bremen). He holds an MA in Digital Media from HfK Bremen and a BA in Design from São Paulo State University (Unesp Bauru). He is currently a PhD candidate in the PhDArts program in collaboration with HfK Bremen, supported by a doctoral scholarship from the 'Studienstiftung des deutschen Volkes'.