Encounters | Digital Art Portraiture

Encounters | Digital Video Portraiture

Artist Statement

This work emerges from a space where dreams and reality blur,  a crossing point, or perhaps a submersion, from one dimension into another. Science speaks of brain frequencies and how, with a subtle shift, we drift into deeper dream states. Esoteric traditions describe it differently: the soul, untethered from the body as it rests and recharges, continues to wander, for it has no need of sleep. Between these two languages,  the scientific and the mystical,  I find myself listening for what neither can fully explain.

We know there is always more. As new instruments reveal greater depths of the unseen, our perception too evolves, from flat to spherical, from one-dimensional to many. Yet for all our knowing, we cannot yet grasp the origin of a single leaf. This awareness, that we stand before mystery, humbles me. It is from this humility that my dream began.

I had fallen asleep, only to awaken elsewhere, in another time, another space. There, I encountered beings of a different nature, woven of other silks. Whether this was the expanse of imagination, the unconscious mind, or a true leap into another realm, I cannot say. For now, I leave aside the need to decide.

I had once trained myself in lucid dreaming,  to awaken within dreams, to move consciously through their landscapes. Through those years, I built entire galleries in the architecture of sleep: vast rooms filled with works that I could see, feel, and remember, though they would take decades to manifest in waking life. “Encounters” is one of these memories given form,  an echo from that dream world translated into the language of digital portraiture.

The portraits are reflections of the beings I met during these dream travels. Their presence was not robotic, yet not entirely organic, something in between, softly radiant, as if their skin emitted light. Words fail here, for their essence was felt more deeply than it was seen. They were graceful, gentle, suffused with humor, majesty, and quiet intelligence. Each encounter had its own frequency, its own emotional tone.

The accompanying music arose as an extension of these visions, not sadness, but depth; not melancholy, but the infinite tenderness of being seen by another intelligence. There was love in their gaze, curiosity, even wonder, as if they, too, were meeting something unfamiliar and beautiful in me. Some seemed regal, others shamanic, like keepers of worlds. Their wisdom carried the gravity of a thousand lifetimes, yet their presence dissolved all fear.

In their company, there was peace beyond any I had known,  beyond even the stone calm of Buddha statues. Their forms sometimes hinted at gender, sometimes not; their essence transcended all such boundaries. To render them in visual form is an impossible task, for language and medium both are inadequate. But what remains is the feeling, luminous, sacred, alive.

In their light, I wished to dissolve, to merge, to see as they see. Perhaps for a moment, I did. Perhaps they carried me across vast distances, through galaxies unseen. What remains is only this trace: the memory of the encounter, the lingering vibration of their presence.

“Encounters” is that trace,  an audio visual record of a night’s journey, a sequence of portraits born from sleep but alive in waking form. A humble offering from the borderlands of dream and reality, where the soul remembers what the mind forgets.