One channel video, FHD 1920 X 1080, 25 fps, color, stereo sound, language spanish.

Length: 21 minutes

In this piece, we enter a computer screen discovering various virtual scenarios that are mainly set in a Metaverse (Second Life), while listening to two off voices that explain how they approach discomfort in different ways. Through these testimonies, a parallelism is created between a virtual reality and a meditation (as well as other spiritual practices) as ways to move to be transported to another dimension and manage problems or worries and to approach things and situations which we don’t achieve in our reality. The protagonists are represented as avatars as they move through and inhabit these virtual scenarios. A third voice guides us through a meditation to take us on this virtual journey.

The title “Blink Studies” references a term often used in a gaming context known as “blink” or “blinking” – a trick that videogame players use through commanding or hacking online games to disappear and appear in another place nearby in attempt to confuse the opponent.

The term AVATAR has been used for centuries in Hindu theology to reference a Godly incarnated form appearing on Earth to restore the dharma, while also saving the world from the cosmic disorder caused by the Gods’ enemies. According to these beliefs, countless avatars have already descended to Earth. Although this term was initially used outside of this context in a game called “Ultima IV: Quest of the Avatar” in 1985 (reference video at minute 5:37), Neal Stephenson was the first person to use this term in the cyberspace context within the literary science fiction framework. In fact, it was his novel “Snow Crash” (1992) that popularized and fixed the term in computer lingo, telling the story of a pizza delivery man living a double life in a futuristic and anarcho-capitalist Metaverse. As the deity “passes” from the higher realms of being to a simpler realm of the material Earth, a human becomes an avatar in a computer-generated parallel reality.