Jimena Carolina is a Chilean new media artist from Valparaíso City, currently based in Santiago, Metropolitan Region. Her light art stems from a childhood fascination with the nocturnal landscape of the Fifth Region, which offers a panorama of lights with diverse characteristics and forms defined by its hills, valleys, boats, and lighthouses. A graduate of the Pontifical Catholic University of Chile (PUC) with a Bachelor of Arts degree and a Diploma in Visual Arts Theory, her work reflects on both the material realm and the symbolic and poetic depth of art. She explores site-specific mapping installations using everyday objects and live camera capture as supports, and projection and/or lasers as light sources.

The ephemeral is highlighted as a central concept, manifested through light drawings for specific moments that subsequently disappear, as well as by projecting the images of people passing through these spaces, thus creating an aesthetic act presented as unrepeatable. In the realm of sound, she uses everyday urban recordings, modified in post-production for these installations, along with her own voice, usually inverted. Lately, she has been working in the field of sound art under the pseudonym JMNA, employing voice, Korg MonotronDelay analog synthesizer, and Ableton Live. Part or Colegio Extraterrestre Records, a little label from Valparaíso that explores new and experimental music. 

Her latest investigation is dedicated to perform live sound and live laser light art, communicating software trough MIDI channels and BlackHole for audio that MadMapper receives, creating multiple parameters associated to laser media parameters.



STATEMENT
Through artistic language of boldness, my site-specific installations employ video art, projection mapping, laser, sound, Arduino sensors, live camera feeds among others, to offer an experience that transcends mere spectacle. In this sense, I project onto everyday objects and places often forgotten in their functionality, expressing through this dialectic the poetry beneath my work.
 
Psychoanalytic dimension of technology and subjective need for expression inspires me, along the possibility of sharing experiences and concepts to the viewer through artistic codes. I conceive art as an uncertain, random, unpredictable process, as the uncertainty of living, as the irreducibility of an individual who resists in their existence.
 
Light is ephemeral like our passage through the world, synonymous of time. I Illuminate to create life: unrepeatable aesthetic moments in a particular place for the people who inhabit it.
 
I conclude with a fundamental thought: Machines are mediums, not purposes. My work is not based on the skills I may have because of constant discovery and exploration of software, but rather on what lies beneath, the human element, the flow of a Wu Wei that,doing without doing, enslaves me to the infinite complexity of a piece whose nature is not questioned, because I cannot be simple. The mere fact of existence signifies an intricate battle with myself, one that can only be eased through artistic creation, force and reason for my presence on this plane of consciousness.
I have no certainty of the final outcome of my work, I only “see” the creative process. Only when I witness a piece that has already taken life on its own, I understand why and what for I´m alive, gives me strength to keep on.