Sofia Braga

Sofia Braga (Parma, 1991) is an Italian artist based in Linz (Austria). She develops her artistic research at the intersection between Digital and Post-Digital practices, focusing especially on the materiality of the web and the social impact of web interfaces. She graduated in Visual Arts (BA, MA) at the Academy of Fine Arts of Bologna and is currently attending the Interface Cultures master program at the University of Art and Design of Linz. In 2019 she was an artist in residence at IAMAS – Institute of Advanced Media Arts and Sciences in Ōgaki, Japan, and she curated the Internet Yami-Ichi at Ars Electronica Festival and its first Italian edition in Bologna.

Her works have been exhibited at Ars Electronica Festival (Linz, Austria), The Wrong – The New Digital Art Biennale, Pinacoteca Albertina di Torino (Italy), Deutsche Bank (Milan, Italy), Xie Zilong Photography Museum (Changsha, China), XII Video Vortex Conference (La Valletta, Malta), Speculum Artium (Trbovlje, SIovenia), Link Cabinet (Italy) and more.

→ www.sofiabraga.com

Exhibited works

You Are Running Out of Battery, 2018 – ongoing
Website and installation, screen, inflatable mattresses, digital prints on fabric, plants, various objects, variable size

Scrolling, the act of moving content up and down on a screen, is probably the most common gesture we do in our daily interaction with computers and smartphones. The act of scrolling on a screen feeds the content bulimia that characterizes our relationship with the web, the need to continually see something new popping up at every scroll, generating a potentially infinite feed. With You Are Running Out of Battery, Sofia Braga focuses her attention on this very act and on the peculiar modality of browsing among the presented content, namely what in web design is known as infinite scrolling.

The work creates and offers to the user an unusual and non-functional way to browse content, one that triggers the desire to continue scrolling, moving forward and deeper in a stream of visual and aesthetic elements. Browser windows and tabs, notifications and alerts as well as structural and architectural elements of the graphic interface (GUI) are mounted and combined in a long and endless collage. This deconstruction of the web interfaces leads an aesthetic experience that exhorts the user to observe the everyday nature of the web from an unusual point of view, transforming the act of scrolling into a meditative experience.

(Matteo Cremonesi)

Welcome to my channel, 2019
Performance and installation, smartphone, digital prints, selfie sticks, various objects

Sofia Braga’s work consists of the appropriation of video vlogs downloaded from some of the most widespread online platforms, in which young people confess intimate and confidential aspects of their existence online, including their experiences linked with mental disorders.

The editing of these materials follows the typical format of this kind of digital product: an introduction, the presentation of the topic of the video and, at the end, an invitation to follow the channel. Within this virtual context, mental health is just another tool to be employed within the dynamics of self-narrative on social media.

It is thus very difficult to trace the boundaries between reality and fiction, since personal narrative gets confused with self promotion and with the promotion of potential sponsors.