Digital arts: Ennead showcase at Spazju Kreattiv this June

Organised by a group of nine artists, ‘Ennead’ will be presented at Spazju Kreattiv this coming June. Sitting for their Masters of Fine Arts in Digital Arts, provided by the Department of Digital Arts at the University of Malta, the artworks are based on their practice-led research. The works are multidisciplinary and conceptual, ranging from animation to abstract paintings, photography to telemedicine, audiovisual installations to illustration.

The result is capable of reaching a broad audience on varying levels and with diverse interests. All artists represented here believe that art can and should serve as a catalyst for dialogue, whether relating to the philosophical, cultural, social, political or personal.

The event will be open from the 4th of June till the 27th of June.

Meet the artists

Mickayla Bugeja: The Effects of Verbal and Nonverbal Elements using online platforms

With a background in illustration, interest and love for design, she explores more her artistic skills through an abstract style.

This research will investigate the influence online platforms exert on an individual – to identify the in-betweenness, the interrelation between what is said and what is unsaid.

The “unsaid” or nonverbal communication refers to facial expressions, gestures and mannerisms.

The researcher’s intrigue inspires this study in the workings of communication through online platforms. The COVID-19 pandemic and ensuing lockdown have significantly impacted worldwide and has reshaped communication both in professional and informal contexts.

Peter Magro: Ode to a Stone

With a background in illustration and graphic novels, Peter combines drawing, narrative and practice-based research to produce a short, hand-drawn animation of a location with a fictional interpretation.

An animation based on multiple onsite visits to a location on Manoel Island and culminating in the documentation of natural and human-made changes which affect the landscape and place. This study aimed to observe a location on Manoel Island through psychogeography and phenomenology to understand multiple changes in an area. This research was instigated by his questioning of human intervention in the natural world and to ask whether humanity’s legacy is permanent when faced by the test of time. Ode to a Stone is a visual metaphor inspired by a poem influenced by his visits and observations. This is meant to encourage the viewer to understand the importance of our connection with nature.

Emma Cini: True Colours

Drawing from her experience as a graphic designer and her passion for illustrations, Emmas seeks to express human emotions from a minimalist perspective.

Her illustrations seek to analyze how fear and hope, two opposing forces, came together during the Covid-19 phase and how they can be represented through illustrations.

This study aims to create illustrations that will communicate the participants’ feelings to help people identify with and express their fears and hopes. She is creating an artistic representation of the pandemic.

Clayton Saliba: Digitus Telemedicine and Digital Art

Passionate about art, graphic design and web development. Clayton believes that with each and everyone’s talents and capabilities, we can contribute to make the world a better place a step at a time.

Developing an online app to improve post-treatment health education for Diabetic children

This dissertation focuses on post-treatment and the educational stages of diabetes. It explores the merging of digital illustrations with the medical field and endeavours to shed light on the importance of having medical brochures and appropriate images and illustrations accompany other documents wherein information. This project focuses on digital illustration, and thereby print-based brochures were side-lined, keeping the last trend in mind.

Nicole Zammit: Exploring Mindfulness Art as Meditative Practice

Nicole conducted a self-focused research project bridging notions of meditation, mindfulness, and art therapy from a background in painting and psychology.

The Meditating Mind: A multi-media installation aiming to create a space for viewers to direct their attention towards their inner world and take a moment to engage with the here and now.

This dissertation explores using fluorescent acrylic pouring as an extension of mindfulness and meditative practice. Nicole devised her approach to meditative painting through auto- ethnographic research, acting to gain a deeper understanding of the self. Moreover, her installation features a combination of both digital and organic elements.

Bernard Polidano: Confronting the Gaze

With a background in photography, Bernard, through the use of objects of representation and multiple cameras, will try to tackle how much of a person becomes visible in a photographic portrait.

A photographic experiment using object of representation ingaims to penetrate the superficial mask that envelopes the true inner self of the sitter and ascertain their natural character. This dissertation examines how a person’s character and identity can be captured objectively visible in a photographic image.

During this project, he focused on searching the inner self of the sitter over aesthetic accuracy via the use of a symbolic object of representation and a combination of cameras set at different vantage points. In this sense, a portrait is viewed as a piece of data fragmented in time that can be gathered, deconstructed, and optimized to generate a result that effectively examines a subject’s character.

Daphne Sammut: [Psyche uninterrupted] The void of mental activity as an exploration for new audio-visual instruments

Daphne explores hybrid artistic practices utilising technology, sound and audio-visual synthesis. Her work focuses on the individual as an electronic-music compositional tool.

In this thesis, she looks at the sound, mainly noise, as a conceptual grounding and a physical effect for generating altered states of consciousness.

Thriving for the discovery of new interfaces for musical expression

She aims to create new platforms where anyone can make electronic music. The instrument that she opts for in this project does not require any previous knowledge of musicality. The brain can create a connection with the machine, and in this hybrid, the individual becomes a “technological self”.

Nicole Pace: Not always everywhere but always somewhere

A multi-disciplinary creative with a background in fine arts, printmaking and experimental animation, Nicole’s work addresses human themes, extracted from the absent and the present, the physical and unphysical, something and nothing.

An installation projection is exploring darkness and light as ‘unphysicalities’ that physically condition us.

As visual as it is experiential, this research applies darkness and light to physically condition the viewer in an immersive work of art to reflect the human condition. The notions of absence and presence, physical and unphysical, inhabit a pervasive quality within the work, explored through interaction and interruption through the viewer’s presence and eventual absence. This ultimately alludes to darkness and light, which are humanly inevitable.

Lara Manara: CHAOS | ORDER

Working with videography and installation, Lara attempts to create metaphorical and painterly representations of her inner world. An autobiographical video installation, inspired by metaphysical and phenomenological philosophies, places the artist as a physical, embodied presence in the centre, experiencing an ethereal flux of orderly and chaotic streams of consciousness.