Cristela's Shadow

Saul Villegas (The Sun) is a Second-Year MFA student in the Future Stages cohort in the Digital Arts & New Media program at UCSC. Using art to create a revolving system from the mental, physical, and virtual environment, he invites people to participate in the viewer experience through digital mixed-media works. His practice seeks to use the virtual creative space to reimagine archives and extend a stream of consciousness to memories that helped inspire his work. Using AI and editing tools, he builds scenes with projections that mirror perception in altered states—alluding to traumatic events in his life. This virtual world-building portfolio stems from virtual work incited by OpenLab. In the face of traumatic and violent actions, individuals often find themselves in a whirlwind of emotions manifested in their waking and dream states. The anguish, sorrow, and confusion experienced in the aftermath of a homicide are incomparable to the mental episodes that subside in the journey toward healing.

Experimentation in PaR:
Chapters are described as visual essays containing short-story narration accompanied by a montage of images edited to explain the visual and sound phenomena explored.

The concept of Ganzfeld (no perceptual state and deprivation of perceivable objects) results in the mind creating hallucinations to make meaning, generating complex scenes when nothing is present. Addressing the theory of Gelstalt, in which the viewer focuses on the entirety of the composition rather than its parts, the laws of proximity, similarity, continuity, and closure are used in my mixed media works to provide insight into the Temporal Proximity of the central story that occurred within the timeframe of the trauma. Arranging these memories in a non-linear fashion exposes the arrangement of the subject matter to the mental imagery produced in the work.

A speculative future space is designed with a giant orb. You can enter the orb and orbit around the sun with ambient music. 'Rayos' is a poem recited by Saul Villegas, an artist whose recent inspiration to collaborate with the earth and its environment culminated from the work of the 'Ecosexuals' (Beth Stephens & Annie Sprinkle).