Guto Nobrega

While browsing through the list of artists, I struggled to find an artist in which I felt that I could truly relate. I found it hard to find a new media that truly help an organic element. Eventually I found Guto Nobrega, an artist working out of the UK. What really resonated with me as an artist was the way Nobrega was able to seamlessly combine technology, nature and a human element in his work.

To me, Nobrega’s newest work seems to be his most successful. His pieces, Happiness (2007) and Ephemera (2008) utilize time-lapse movies played over human bodies to show connections between humans and nature.

Happiness was created in 2007. Nobrega used time-lapsed movies of plants, created by Roger P. Hangarter and his own animations of imaginary creatures and projected them over various human bodies. This allowed for the movies to interact with the bodies. For example a pair of wings was projected over a woman’s body, making it seem as though the wings were connected to her body. Similarly the images of plants played over a woman’s back helped to illustrate the connection between humans and nature.

Happiness

Happiness from Guto Nobrega on Vimeo.

The next year, in 2008, Nobrega created a similar piece, Ephemera. Ephemera is similar to Happiness in that they both project time-lapse videos over human bodies. But whereas Happiness used both Hangarter’s plant video and Noberga’s own animations, Ephemera uses only videos of plants. Ephemera also utilizes light better, which helps to connect the human element with nature, showing a path between the human creative process and the physical need of light by plants. Light is used almost a medium to paint ideas over the human’s skin, suggesting that the energy found in nature can also be found in humans.

Ephemeron

Ephemera from Guto Nobrega on Vimeo.

Ephemeron is more success than Happiness because it is more focused. Happiness almost feel like an experiment in using a human body as a screen, testing the limits of what different kinds of drawings and videos work with the body and what does not. Meanwhile Ephemera not only uses a stronger sense of light and color to really emphasize the videos themselves but also focuses on how plants and humans are connected.