DIMENSIONAL BODIES: DRAWING ON AIR AND PAINTING ON PAPER            

This artwork emerges from a need to bridge the analog, the digital, and the organic—specifically, the artist's body. It explores the possibility of becoming a cyborg by directly communicating with the machine through bodily movement. By integrating interactive technology, the artist merges alternative photographic media with performance, creating a dynamic interplay between physical presence and computational processes.
Exploring telepresence and interior selves, the work engages with the process of transmitting bodily movement into data and its subsequent rematerialization. Dimensional Bodies investigates the tensions between physical presence and virtual mediation, emphasizing the one-way nature of communication—where movement is captured, processed, and transformed without direct feedback.
Technically, the project employs a handmade CNC plotter that functions as a photo-developing machine. Using blob tracking in TouchDesigner, real-time hand movements are converted into XY coordinates, which are then sent to an Arduino-controlled mechanism that dispenses the photographic developer into a brush with a dripping system that pours the developer onto light-sensitive paper. Two stepper motors move this machine.
In the live performance, the artist's movements stem from memory—recollections of distant landscapes intertwined with the physical possibilities and impossibilities of the body. The body becomes a site of existential and political emergence, embodying what Latinx philosopher Mariana Ortega describes as the "being-between-worlds"—a multiplicitous selfhood shaped by the negotiation of social identities after migration to the U.S. This in-between self is fluid, continuously shaped by intersecting identities and lived experiences.
The artist has a physical relationship with technology, existing as a hybrid between the machine and the organism, extending the body in different ways and playing with the definition of what a human is in the 21st century.

Brenda Vega Dimensional Bodies, Drawing Air, Painting on Paper, Automated Version, 2024. Live Performance, Arduino, Touch Designer, CNC Plotter, Photographic Developer, Brush, Photographic Black and White Paper. Variable Dimensions 2024