PPP
Last Seen in the Lobby
Living Code of Biosemiosis
Route: Way to a Place
Elements: A Walking Path
Artificial Threads
CC: Connection / Catalyst
MicroPerformance
Hidden in the Bloom
Lasianthus
visual.sync
Closeness Index
profile
Dora Siafla (GR b. 2000) is an interdisciplinary artist working across visual and digital media, focusing on data-driven forms, AI systems, video, and user interaction. Her work connects physical materials and computational approaches, investigating how their interplay forms hybrid spaces as platforms for experimental creation.She holds an MA in Audiovisual Arts from the Ionian University, following studies in Visual and Applied Arts at the University of Western Macedonia, where she received two excellence scholarships. Her background is complemented by coursework in computer science and digital methodologies through Harvard’s CS50, MITx, and the University of British Columbia, with ongoing participation in SFPC.Her practice has been presented across international venues, including Ars Electronica, Onassis Stegi x British Council, Boston Cyberarts, NYC Resistor, Winona State University, Athens Digital Arts Festival (ADAF), and the FluxusMuseum Prize Commission for Experimental Video. She has shared her research at international conferences on experimental media, algorithmic sound, AI storytelling, and in IEEE.
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| “Chronicles of Intimacy”, K:art x Yiming Pi, Margate, UK (Nov '25) |
Contact
e-mail: dorasiafla(at)gmail.com
© Dora Siafla. All rights reserved.
Last Seen in the Lobby
Last Seen in The Lobby, 2025
Virtual Environment
Many people turn to video game communities to connect, express themselves, and find a sense of belonging. These spaces are supposed to be free environments where different voices and experiences can exist. But censorship and moderation often work against this idea. ''Last Seen in the Lobby'' is a virtual space filled with ghost-like avatars. Each avatar represents a real person who was silenced or pushed out of gaming spaces. When you move closer, text bubbles appear, showing real statements from online platforms where users explained why they were removed or muted. Some people spoke about mental health, identity, or political views. Others defended someone else or simply shared personal feelings. Even simple words became reasons for bans. This work wants to show how moderation systems and social dynamics decide who gets to speak and who disappears. It keeps visible the words of people who were erased from places meant to be open and shared.
Transforming Medicine Through AI and Art
Planetary-Personal-Pain (PPP), 2025
Interactive App/Website
Ars Electronica, LBG OIS Center, JKU LIFT_C
‘’Planetary-Personal-Pain’’ (PPP) takes the form of an interactive pain map, visualizing the entanglement of ecological destruction, socio-economic fragility, and human suffering. Drawing on data from social media expressions of pain, medical health datasets, GDP statistics, and environmental records, phantom scars emerge as craters on the Earth’s surface, each sonified through the five elements of Traditional Chinese Medicine - Wood, Fire, Earth, Metal, and Water. Participants’ narratives of pain are integrated into this planetary cartography, encouraging reflection on the ongoing impact of ecological and health crises. Users share their personal narratives of pain, adding depth to the collective and lingering pain corresponding to environmental distress in different countries.
PPP was developed during the Hackathon 2025, a three-day program organized by @jkulinz’s LIFT_C, @arselectronica, and @ludwigboltzmanngesellschaft's OIS Center. The work was presented at the Ars Electronica Festival 2025 in Linz, as part of the showcase "Transforming Medicine through AI and Art."Team: Dora Siafla, Hollis Hui, Julia Guthrie, Jack Heseltine, Ines Gerard-Ursin, Lukas Troyer, Mary Maggic, Mathieu Mahve-Beydokhti, Michael Artner, Péter Velősy.
The Living Code of Biosemiosis
The Living Code of Biosemiosis, 2024-25
Interactive Installation
Diploma Thesis, Department of Audio & Visual Arts, Ionian University
The work draws from the principles of biosemiotics, specifically the idea that life is based on codes and signs.At its core is the cell, around which the installation is developed. This research suggests an understanding of ''semiosis'' as an intrinsic process of the body, arising through its continuous relation to the surrounding environment. The world is shaped by continuous exchanges of signals, many of which remain unseen to human perception. Cells respond to chemical signals, plants transmit information through their roots, and animals communicate through movements, sounds, and colors. If every structural element carries an imprint of meaning within it, then the body, the environment, and information form an inseparable field.The interactive structure is activated by touching a biometric sensor for an extended period. Within a small square frame, a black droplet of magnetic fluid transforms, forming shapes reminiscent of cells. As the form settles, it leaves behind a trace of a residual mark, akin to blood. Above the droplet, a small camera captures these transformations. The images are projected on a large scale onto the wall. Simultaneously, the changes in the form of the droplet cell are translated into sound, creating an acoustic environment that evolves in real-time.
Circular Cultures Design School 2024
Artificial Threads, 2024
Generated Text Prototype
Onassis Stegi x British Council (Onassis ONX)
This practice explores how cultural traditions change over time, following a storytelling process similar to the evolution of oral histories.It uses two artificial intelligence systems to generate a sequence of narratives: starting with a traditional story, one AI continues it, and another AI further expands the narrative. This recursive process highlights the small changes, reinterpretations, and patterns that emerge as stories pass through different "voices", both human and artificial. The work examines collective memory, emphasizing the fluid nature of storytelling, where no story remains fixed.It raises questions such as: Who tells the story? Can AI be considered a cultural author?This prototype was developed at the Circular Cultures Design School, an initiative of @onassis.stegi Foundation and @onassis.onx in collaboration with the @britishcouncil.
Elements: A Walking Path
Elements: A Walking Path, 2022
Video Art, 1:00
Walking becomes a way of reading the land.The piece concerns a route in a natural landscape, where during the course, material was collected through recording applications, and some of the information that emerged was used for the audiovisual material: the shape of the route, numbers, words, and symbols.Walking as a practice reveals how the real world is perceived subjectively. In the process, even the body itself functions as a medium, detecting the place, processing it, and subsequently producing the stimuli received. Each region ceases to be something objectively defined and is shaped according to the experiences of the individual in it.Τhe video challenges conventional mapping and explores post-digital landscapes where data, memory, and place are continuously redefined.
Under the Microscope
Under the Microscope, 2023
Video Art, 2:00
Nothing truly disappears-matter only shifts, dissolves, and reforms. What we discard, what erodes, what decays does not cease to exist; it transforms and is absorbed into systems that long predate us.The materials collected for this study come from sites marked by transition: landscapes of extraction, spaces of abandonment, and ground altered by time or force. Organic matter is broken down, and repurposed into soil, while remnants of human production linger, resistant to time. Under the microscope, these materials reveal their liminality-bodies dissolving into landscapes, structures reduced to particles, traces of presence suspended between past and future. The images captured through a microscopic camera expose a threshold where material existence is neither fixed nor absent but in continuous negotiation with time. In a world of relentless consumption and decay, what does it mean to return, and what remains irreversibly altered?
Route: Way to a Place
Route: Way to a Place, 2022-23
Video Projection-Installation
Diploma Thesis, Department of Fine & Applied Arts, UoWM
In recent years, the term aesthetics has undergone a shift, shaped by the dynamics of digital culture and online communities. A growing, internet-born understanding positions aesthetics as an assemblage of images, colors, objects, music, and textual styles; capable of evoking a particular mood, social function, or sense of identity. This contemporary usage is highly subjective, contingent on personal taste, cultural context, and media exposure, and has become especially prevalent in platforms such as Tumblr, TikTok, and Instagram, where visual coherence is often a substitute for deeper narrative.This shift is not neutral. What appears to be a playful or even superficial layering of stylistic fragments is, in many cases, a response to the fragmentation of identity and meaning in a post-digital landscape. The algorithmic curation of these experiences often collapses the boundary between authenticity and performance, with aesthetics functioning as soft architectures of emotional alignment. This shift informs the installation’s structure. Built with five translucent rice papers, the space receives projections that generate volumes and layered surfaces. Writing incorporates textures and elements from digital environments, such as software terminology, glitches, program fonts, pixels, icons, windows, GPS graphics, RGB systems, waveforms, and 3D wireframes. Together, they form a coded visual online language.
CC: Connection/Catalyst
CC: Connection/Catalyst, 2024
Interactive Installation
In an era where inertia becomes a mechanism of complicity and observation replaces action, this work employs an interactive system to bring the Bystander Effect to life in real time. As viewers approach, the particles in the space react, shifting, accelerating, or becoming disrupted, mirroring the delicate balance between engagement and detachment. Presence alone is enough to disturb the balance, yet absence is just as decisive. Without participation, inertia prevails. If no one steps forward, nothing changes. The work explores the interplay between individual agency and collective movement, shaping an evolving environment where participation or the lack of it leaves a visible impact.At its core, a circular segment of the projection displays messages like 'Are you aware of your role?’, encouraging visitors to reconsider their place within the social fabric. Its form is dictated by the presence or absence of engagement, just as social dynamics are shaped by collective will or passive silence. The work leverages the natural limitation of the distance sensor: when multiple viewers approach simultaneously, the measurement becomes unstable or imprecise. This technical ambiguity is deliberately integrated into the system, reflecting the social confusion and diffusion of responsibility central to the Bystander Effect.
Lasianthus
Image: GenBank
Lasianthus, 2024
Sound Art, 6:40
Who deciphers, who encodes, and who listens?This work sonically translates the DNA of plant species from the Rubiaceae family, using their extreme genetic variability as a compositional foundation. The high degree of diversity, especially in the non-coding regions of chloroplast DNA, prevents stable molecular classification and leaves certain genera within the family scientifically unresolved. The project reflects on forms of life that resist categorization, stabilization, and ownership. The composition amplifies irregularity, giving voice to what science often treats as noise or error. Ongoing cases of biopiracy targeting plant genomes demonstrate how conflicts over genetic material remain entangled with broader systems of control.Complete chloroplast DNA sequences, sourced from public databases, were algorithmically mapped into sound, assigning each character to a distinct sonic event. The piece preserves the raw, linear structure of the genetic code, allowing the instability and ambiguity of biological material to emerge audibly. Through the transformation of biological volatility into sound, the piece engages with the theme of life’s unruliness as a form of refusal against taxonomic, legal, and commercial systems. Listening becomes an encounter with a form of existence that refuses to conform, occupying a space beyond fixed narratives or structures.
Audio Sample
visual.sync
visual.sync, 2024
Print, 50x50 cm
The work investigates the eye as a biological interface exposed to processes of capture and computation. In 2024, a documented demonstration of security flaws in avatars within VR/MR environments raised concern, showing that even minute ocular micro-movements can be converted into exploitable cues for inference and monitoring. Positioning the body within regimes of modeling and mapping makes visible the tensions that emerge around biometric extraction, protocols of consent, and the politics of embodiment in digital systems.Within this framework, the coupling with iris motion reconfigures the avatar as a relay of transmission, where unconscious signals take on a function that exceeds mere visual depiction.
Closeness Index
Closeness Index, 2025
Virtual Space
By constructing a synthetically intimate setting with an AI system, the work examines how machine-based memory organizes linguistic signals associated with closeness.Over several days, a sequence of affectively weighted, chat-based texts was exchanged to simulate conditions of interpersonal interaction. After this exchange, the model was prompted to determine which entries to retain. Rather than mirroring human logic or narrative continuity, the selection process reflected internal computational criteria, including lexical recurrence, tonal markers, and compositional patterns.The virtual space presents the model’s output as a mapped arrangement. Drawing from how neural networks organize data in multidimensional spaces, the environment spatially manifests the model’s internal selection process, making abstract memory structures tangible. A fixed spherical form holds the center, indicating presence and maintaining a low typing sound triggered by proximity. Around it, the selected texts are organized by thematic criteria extracted from the model’s selection logic. Each wall hosts one parameter and its associated fragments.Serving as an experimental framework, the design setting facilitates the expression of the model’s internal logic as a blueprint, separating memory from dialogue, and encouraging reflection on the nature of artificial remembrance.
