PORTFOLIO

Nourathar Studio is a creative technologies lab whose work explores the impact of technology on our perception, as well as the subjective nature of reality. Current members are Caen Botto and Marta Rupérez. The studio is dedicated to the development of experiences that investigate and question the potential of emerging media and technologies.

Recent creations by Nourathar convey their disappointment with the simplification of reality prompted by the technification of all its features. In their devices, installations and performances, they defend technology as a tool to appreciate the complexity, the infinite nuances, and the interconnections that make possible the poem of existence. They suggest a poetic relationship with technology that encourages inner silence, as an alternative to the technological cacophony that surrounds and distracts us. 

Nourathar's work arises from the hybrid space between artistic creation and technological development. Their art occurs in liminal zone between the physical and the virtual, between the analog and the digital. 

Research by Nourathar articulates contemporary history and archaeology; it materializes in projects that implement augmented reality, immersive environments, physical interaction, optical illusionism and other hi & lo-tech mirages. Through these projects they imagine another version of what technology could have been in the past, and what it could become in the future. The confluence of proto-cinematic techniques with digital tools draws audiences into a dreamscape inhabited by futurities from an imaginary past and memories from an oneiric future.

More about Nourathar Studio / Founders' Bios

SELECTED EXHIBITIONS

Nourathar Studio's recent exhibitions present installations (sensitive spaces) and audiovisual devices (hypnosophical devices) that combine digital media, physical interaction and augmented reality with analogue resources and obsolete technologies. 

ARTWORKS

SENSITIVE SPACES

Nourathar's interactive artworks invite users to explore the connections between the light, colour and sound spectra. The visitor’s physical experience with these artworks generates further correspondences with the environment. In this way, the gallery becomes a sensitive space, an audiovisual instrument with an invisible interface that allows for an intuitive experience of the work, in which audiences become active participants of the artwork, instead of passive spectators.

Custom application in each interactive artwork, developed in Max/MSP/Jitter by Caen Botto.

HYPNOSOPHICAL DEVICES

Recent audiovisual devices by Nourathar combine technological antiques and analogue media with augmented reality and contemporary, digital media. These artworks expose the obsolescence of technologies which determined historical realities and underline how the promises of the future inherent to those appliances have faded away. The convergence of physical and virtual elements in these artworks seeks to recover antique tricks, optical illusions or scientific conjurations from XIXth century stage magic, a time when "technology was indistinguishable from magic". 

In all of them the silent animation is approached with a musical sense of rhythm and balance.