Artist Talk at Reykjavik Art Museum by visual artist and photographer Yael BC for the Hafnar Community Showcase

1. Your work moves between the tactile and the algorithmic, between the sensuality of the physical world and the abstraction of digital systems. If you had to describe what you do in one concrete example, what would you say? It is all rooted in my mythology regarding Nature. For me there are interfaces between the two, and there is where I like to wander. They represent two sets of tools that enable me to give sense to my understanding of existence. They give me a clue on the underlying energies that interplay between concepts of good and evil. 2. You often speak about this tension between the analog and digital world. Is that tension you experience physically while working or does it live in the conceptual space of the finished piece? The experience is always physical first. The finished piece doesn’t really matter. The artwork is only the final stigma of the underlying experience I encounter, when I let go to move to the next question. I come from experimental narration, and I try to tell my stories so it could make sense to others. I attempt to share the happiness or sadness in ways that might make someone else feel better, or at least make one feel less lonely in that intimate solo experience that is life. 3. Many people today feel overwhelmed by digital systems-algorithms, constant updates, ai. Do you feel your work resists that environment, collaborates with it, or just observes it? (are you fighting the machine/ flirting with it / dissecting it?) I fundamentally am in love with the analog. But when I am scared of something I will confront it. One should in my opinion not let scare shut you into a cocoon. I need to experience my opposite as it may actually not be what I think it is, and the digital is the dragon in my mythology. Someone has to confront it as in it may lay the answers to who we are and why we love. Digital systems are the monsters, the flame breathing dragons of nightmares. But when you look at them more closely, they are only the source of often sweet artefacts and aliases that then grow like crystals or fungi into the analog world. Nature is both continuous analog spectrum and highly polarised binary entity, refuting one or the other is only futile in my humble opinion, and the source of so much misunderstanding and suffering. It craves on the harmony of the analog and the tension between poles. We are both analog fluid and digital gendered, and only nature decides at times who we are, not ego. 4. You mentioned mythology, magic and nature alongside code. What do those elements offer that logic alone cannot? Or more simply: where does intuition enter your process? Intuition offers the insight. I am the messenger between worlds only because of it. Logic is a very rudimentary yet powerful tool. There are many theories about consciousness, some are logical some aren’t. One is related to fluxes of entropy and navigates between logic and magic, unprovable and non disprovable. Elder magic and nature-related rituals generate massively intense entropy fluxes, as are starting to be these huge data and code churning entities we implemented with AI. Again, I am not fond of them, but I believe they are here for a reason. And being reactionary in regards to nature rituals and life will not in my opinion lead to positive magic. We need to go beyond this egocentric view of the world that we would be what we want to be, and more accept the possibility we are humbly what nature has made us. Additionally, these new digital entities may also be some kind of natural path to understanding the new dimensions that already lie among us. 5: When does a system, technological or artistic, stop being a tool and start shaping the way we think? I think all tools shape the way we think. Using tools and making things doesn’t however guarantee you are making art. You can’t just call yourself an artist because you want to. Being an artist is beyond the craftsman, art is something new to the current state of nature, not only restitution or imitation. It is that new story we bring and share. We master the tools through craftsmanship, but we then transcend them through art. 6. You return often to the question of consciousness. Has working with technology changed how you experience your own presence in the world? Do you feel more expanded? More fragmented? Yes as I am way more perplexed and have way less answers now than when I begun. The monster of AI and digital systems only reinforced my need to go back to my animistic beliefs, to the nature, the stones, the moss, the flowers, the sea and the sky, to the elements. And weirdly, I feel these modern technological systems are fully under the control of nature, in a weird way that I still need to explore. 7. If technology disappeared tomorrow - no code, no algorithms, would your core question about consciousness remain the same? Or is it inseparable from the systems we've built? Ancestral rituals are technologies. Magic and sorcery are. Poetry is too. Technology is just a matter of how we define the tools of our relationship to Nature. Either we humbly accept that we don’t know that much, follow the implicit flow of existence and adapt to what we are given, or we force feed our projections into wanting the world to adapt to us. Technology is just a word that reminds us there might be rituals worth using to get in touch with the deeper values that make us and our surroundings. Being reactionary and refusing progress or new ways again is not a solution, it only serves a minority unwilling to accept what nature has given them and creates fear and confusion, cults instead of communities. Technology offers ways beyond scares and dissolves the cult of individuals polarising forces by offering a method for each of us to have the power to be ourselves. We don’t need new leaders, we need new rituals aside or expanding ancient ones, thus new technologies but they probably don’t necessarily need to be digital in nature. 8. If everyone here leaves tonight with 1 open question still resonating in them, what would you want that question to be? How can we all make ourself a bit happier together? Never be scared of love.