MASK — A Portal Between Identities is an Augmented Reality exhibition presented by .ART during ICANN87 in Bali, bringing together five digital artworks that explore the mask as a space of transformation, identity and connection.
Through Augmented Reality, attendees are invited to virtually try on each of the five masks, experiencing the artworks in direct relation to their faces and bodies. The masks move beyond the screen into physical space, creating encounters between bodies and digital forms, ancient traditions and contemporary technologies, individual identities and collective narratives.
Why Masks?
The project takes its starting point from Bali, where masks hold a significant place within the island’s cultural and artistic traditions. More than decorative objects, Balinese masks are closely connected to performance, ceremony, storytelling and spiritual practice.
From this local context, the project expands the conversation across different cultures, histories and contemporary digital realities.
Across cultures and throughout history, masks have existed at the intersection of ritual, transformation, storytelling and identity. They can conceal and reveal, preserve memory, embody ancestors or imagined beings, signal belonging, and allow their wearers to temporarily cross from one state into another.
For MASK — A Portal Between Identities, an international open call invited artists to approach the mask as a threshold object: a tool for transformation and presence, a keeper of memory, a ritual instrument and a portal between identities.
What happens when we put on a mask? Does it conceal who we are, or allow another identity to emerge? What identities can a mask allow us to inhabit? How can ritual, mythology and different systems of knowledge be translated into digital forms? What new rituals and mythologies are emerging through technology?
Through Augmented Reality, the five works explore these questions within a space where the physical and virtual overlap. The mask can appear, disappear, and transform, creating new relationships between artwork, wearer, environment, and audience.
The participating artists draw on different cultural contexts, personal histories, mythologies, environments and imagined worlds, offering five distinct interpretations of what a mask can represent today.
Leveraging state-of-the-art augmented reality (AR) technology, each of the masks is able to be “worn” and experienced, in real time, and in place by anyone attending the exhibition.
Activation
Guidelines
This activation will be using “Face Targets” to render pre-configured augmented reality graphics. In order to activate this type of AR experience, a visitor will need to do the following:
1
Scan QR code & wait about 10 seconds for intro screen to load (depends on cell service)
2
Tap accept user agreement, tap and accept motion, camera, and location permissions.
3
Look directly into phone (selfie view), AR graphic will render in 1-2 seconds
4
Tap the small circular button at the bottom of the screen to snap a photo or longhold the button to record a video.
5
Tap the “share” button to save the image, video, or share to social media
SCAN
1 / 5
Flora Face 1
João Peixinho
João Peixinho is a Portugal-based digital artist whose practice explores the relationship between nature and technology. Working across digital art, augmented reality, and virtual objects, he transforms botanical forms and organic structures into contemporary digital compositions. His work moves between physical and virtual environments, considering how technology can offer new ways of encountering and reimagining the natural world. Inspired by Bali’s tropical landscape, Flora Face 1 brings together monstera leaves, ferns, lotus, and frangipani in a sculptural composition arranged around the human face. Botanical forms become an extension of the wearer, blurring the boundary between body and environment. Combining organic references with a distinctly digital aesthetic, the mask explores how nature can be translated into virtual space and how technology might create new forms of connection between human identity and the living world.
SCAN
2 / 5
SYNAPTICA — A Portal Between Selves
Yuliya (YO_DESi) Ovcharyk
Yuliia Ovcharyk, working under the creative name YODESi, is a Ukrainian digital artist and 3D fashion designer currently based in North Carolina, USA. With a background in physical fashion design spanning more than two decades, she now works across 3D art, digital fashion, AI-assisted visual experimentation, and immersive storytelling. Her practice explores identity, transformation, the human body, and the increasingly fluid relationship between physical and digital realities. SYNAPTICA — A Portal Between Selves approaches identity as something fluid and continuously evolving, shaped by memory, perception, emotion, and technological mediation. The mask becomes a threshold between different versions of the self: physical and virtual, familiar and imagined, present and possible. Drawing on the visual languages of digital fashion and speculative design, the work asks where the human body ends and its technological extensions begin, transforming the mask into a portal through which another identity can temporarily emerge.
SCAN
Frenatus
Özlem Mehder
Özlem Mehder is a self-taught artist based in Turkey whose practice is informed by her background in anthropology. She holds a BA in Anthropology and an MSc in Forensic Anthropology from Ankara University. Working primarily through painting and illustration, Mehder approaches image-making as another language through which personal experiences and memories can be translated and preserved. Her work reflects an ongoing interest in observation, memory, and the experience of moving through different places and moments in time. Frenatus draws on a range of animal archetypes to create a single hybrid character embodying seemingly contradictory qualities: elegance and ferocity, stubbornness and vulnerability. Rather than defining when or why these different traits emerge, the work leaves the character deliberately open to identification and interpretation. The mask becomes a reflection on the multiple qualities contained within a single identity and on the strength required to remain grounded in one’s convictions while accepting the consequences of one’s choices.
3 / 5
SCAN
4 / 5
Crown Energizing Maskal Mate
LMDesigns8
LMDesigns8 is a US-based multidisciplinary artist and the artistic identity of LMDesigns LLC. Their practice combines immersive technology, healing arts, Afro-Futurist world-building, and wearable design to create experiences that move between physical and digital environments. Working with augmented reality, spatial computing, sound, and multisensory storytelling, LMDesigns8 explores how technology can become a medium for transformation, wellbeing, and expanded forms of perception. Crown Energizing Maskal Mate is conceived as a wearable digital object for energy renewal and personal transformation. The mask combines an animated paint-pour mandala, original visual designs, crown chakra symbols, and elements of the artist’s sound-bowl meditation practice. Bringing these components together within an augmented-reality experience, the work treats the mask as a contemporary ritual object: a digital interface through which the wearer can temporarily inhabit a state associated with serenity, elevation, and self-alignment.
SCAN
5 / 5
Computational Theory of Mind
Claudia Tong
Claudia Tong is a London-based artist working at the intersection of traditional and new media. Her multidisciplinary practice spans painting, illustration, mixed media, visual computing, photography, and music. A graduate of Brown University in Computer Science, Tong brings artistic and computational perspectives together in a practice that considers how technological systems shape contemporary experience and our understanding of ourselves. Computational Theory of Mind takes its title from the philosophical proposition that the human mind can be understood as a computational system. Combining biological forms with digital structures, the mask examines the growing interdependence between humans and machines and the ways technology is becoming embedded within contemporary identity. It raises questions about authenticity and intelligence in an increasingly mediated world: whether our digital selves reflect who we are, whether artificial intelligence can reproduce human intelligence, and whether technological development is bringing us closer to or further from the natural world.