From the seductive gaze of VIGILANTE_EXTENDED to the shapeshifting liberation of echoes of a wet finger, Brazilian artist Vitória Cribb discusses surveillance, artificial intelligence, body horror and why transformation, rather than resolution, lies at the heart of her evolving practice.
8 July 2026
Contemporary life is increasingly shaped by invisible systems of surveillance, algorithmic decision-making and digital performance, yet few artists navigate these conditions with the unsettling wit and visual intensity of Vitória Cribb. This June, Videobrasil launches the inaugural edition of The Curatorial Cycle, a new platform dedicated to expanding the ways in which contemporary art from the Global South is circulated, researched, and critically engaged with. Curated by Clarissa Diniz, the first edition unfolds across both digital and public space, presenting Cribb’s moving-image trilogy online while bringing BUGs (2023) to the façade of São Paulo’s Museu de Arte Contemporânea da Universidade de São Paulo (MAC USP) as a monumental urban projection. Bringing together VIGILANTE_EXTENDED (2022), BUGs (2023), and echoes of a wet finger (2024), the programme traces a journey from hyper-surveillance and technological anxiety to mutation, liberation and the radical possibilities of becoming. By linking these works, Cribb shows how surveillance, transformation and digital desire shape one another. Blurring the boundaries among the human body, digital systems, and the subconscious, Cribb embraces absurdism, body horror, and transformation to reimagine identity in an increasingly networked world. ART AFRICA speaks with the artist about artificial intelligence, digital existence, the politics of looking, and why the glitch may be one of the most profoundly human gestures of all.
Suzette Bell-Roberts: Across VIGILANTE_EXTENDED, BUGs, and echoes of a wet finger, surveillance, technology, and transformation recur as central concerns. How did the conceptual focus evolve across the trilogy?
Victoria Cribb: The trilogy didn’t begin as a fixed narrative arc, but as a shift in attention. The characters Vigilantes first appeared in 2021. It was mainly an experimentation and character study around avatars, surveillance, and digital existence. Inspired by the feelings and conditions of the pandemic (COVID-19), they attempted to embody the feeling of being under surveillance in such a sensitive moment. They consisted of feminine characters surrounded by many eyes and ears, making collective surveillance visible through figures that watch and are watched.
In 2022, VIGILANTE_EXTENDED appears as an extension of these characters. It tells their stories and portrays these entities of surveillance not in a corporate way, but in a feminine, sensual, and magnetic way. The film addresses systems of surveillance, control, and visibility structures that define how bodies are seen and classified. It also plays with the ideas of seduction and fear, showing how, as a society, we fear surveillance but keep being drawn to it. In this way, the work links control with attraction.
Then, in 2023, I made BUGs, a film where the urge to escape cyberspace and surveillance systems emerges. It features three main characters: a bug, a beetle car, and a humanoid. I play with the meaning of “BUG,” which can mean an “error” in technological space, an insect in biological space, and a model of a popular car (“Beetle”), bringing humanity, technology, and nature together. The film also addresses how the “bug,” or the “error,” is often accepted in machines but often denied to women who have “erratic behaviours.” This makes the film a link between technical failure and gendered control.
Lastly, in 2024, I started animating echoes of a wet finger. Here, attention no longer fixes itself on the system and the entities that control us. Instead, the film invites transformation and shapeshifting, and it asks us to confuse the eyes that observe us. It invites us to understand that we can become what we most fear. The film follows a woman who is afraid of lizards and transforms into one. The mutation helps her realise that she is both like what she fears and the only thing that can liberate her from the prison of who she is. In this final movement, transformation becomes the answer to surveillance.
So, I would say that the evolution arc of the three films consists of hyper-surveillance, the urge to escape it, and transformation as liberation.
The figure of the Vigilante emerges as both observer and observed. What interests you about this unstable position of looking and being looked at in digital culture?
What interests me is that this position is no longer exceptional. We currently live in a society where we have mass access to each other’s opinions on social media, with algorithms validating our existence and corporations collecting our data. This is the default condition of digital life. For me, especially during the production of the films, the idea that we were collectively surveilling each other and behaving in a way that responded to this collective surveillance was fascinating and, of course, gave me a lot of anxiety. As an artist and thinker, I found that this pandemic period was marked by pressure to produce new work with tight or nonexistent budgets. Society was extracting from artists as it extracts from machines, and the relation of “who is observing vs who is being observed” or “who is consuming vs who is producing” was latent and decisive when creating those artworks. The Vigilantes figure embodies this instability: it is this monster, sensual entity that observes us but lets the audience observe it. They are static; they aren’t aggressive, but they make us, humanity, bow down to them. I am drawn to this tension because it destabilises the idea of control and also pushes the idea of fascination and attraction. It makes us realise that seduction lives within fear, linking observation to desire.
BUGs focus on glitches, disruptions, and system failures. Do you see the bug as a form of resistance, vulnerability, or possibility within technological systems?
Yes definitely! We live now in an era of Artificial Intelligence, where everyone is constantly seeking perfection and treating art as data. But the reality is that only humans can dictate what art is, what is new, what is pastiche, and what is plagiarism. For me, the disruptions, glitches and failures bring us back to humanity, to the core of experimentation and to the centre of creation. They also keep the work connected to the human conditions that the trilogy explores.
Throughout the trilogy, the boundaries between human bodies and digital environments appear increasingly porous. How do you understand the relationship between technology and embodiment in your practice?
In this trilogy, I tried to merge the digital environment with the humanoids as if they were a single organism feeding back into itself. I believe that we, as a society, still separate ourselves from technological systems when, in reality, we are much more merged with them than we acknowledge. In BUGs, I explore this exact idea when merging the three characters (insect, human, car) at the end of the film. At the same time, we complain about technology, but we forget that we created it. In that same movement, we distance ourselves from nature in an attempt to live, be, or embody a more modern life. Everything feeds on itself, but we keep pretending that all those areas belong to separate spaces. The work aims to make that porosity between those worlds visible and a little unsettling, revealing the mutant form at the end. This keeps embodiment, technology and nature in the same chain of becoming.
In echoes of a wet finger, metamorphosis becomes a powerful narrative device. What does transformation allow you to explore that realism cannot?
Transformation allows me to access ambiguous states and access the absurdism of life. In some instances, it has a strong affinity with movements like surrealism. I like to extrapolate ideas of humanity, forms and the linearity of narratives to reflect on current themes that affect society. For example, the pandemic years were very scary, uncertain and definitely transformative, and it didn’t come in an easy way – it was traumatic, weird and brought a light to the craziness and madness side of the human being -but addressing those types of collective trauma through a realistic lens can be more of the same and reinforces that trauma rather than reflect on it. For me, it is crucial to bring a layer of absurdism, weirdness and even the grotesque to subvert the feeling and reflect on the current situation. In the trilogy and in my previous works, I often incorporated elements of psychological thriller or body horror with the aseptic digital aesthetic, a contrast between the chaos and the control – which for me is very funny. Realism can help us situate the state of things, but a generous dose of surrealism and absurdism can expand our perception of humanity. Metamorphosis opens a space where contradiction can coexist without resolution, and in a world fully digital, constantly re-rendered, re-coded, and re-edited, we can explore identity not as something to be defined, but as something continuously becoming.
Dreams, subconscious states, and altered realities play an important role in your work. How do these spaces help you address contemporary experiences of surveillance and digital existence?
Dream states and landscapes offer a way to escape the logic of constant legibility and the rules of society. Surveillance depends on coherence, being readable, categorizable, and traceable, while the dream or nightmare interrupts that. The subconscious produces fragmented, symbolic, and nonlinear forms of perception, allowing us to perceive our power, identity, and desires in ways that can be liberating. In my work, these states become counter-environments where identity is not fully captured and can transform itself without constraints. The possibility and the urge of becoming something—beautiful and grotesque, monstrous and sexy, animalistic or mechanical—allow us to escape horrific reality and face our own desires unfiltered, to build something new. These spaces keep the trilogy’s themes in motion, where surveillance gives way to becoming.
The trilogy moves from external systems of observation to more intimate psychological and bodily transformations. Was this progression intentional from the outset, or did it emerge through the making of the works?
It definitely emerged through making the works. When I did VIGILANTE_EXTENDED, I had no clue that I would make echoes of a wet finger 3 years later. Each work was commissioned by a different institution at a different moment in my life. VIGILANTE_EXTENDED was commissioned by the Denver Art Museum in 2021 and reflected my pandemic hyper-online state of mind. BUGs was created in 2022 in the context of the Videobrasil Biennial (2023) and definitely reflected this internal urge to escape from the online echo chamber that we lived in during the years of the pandemic. Echoes of a wet finger born in 2024 – commissioned by Mercosul Biennial and Sharjah Art Biennial (2025) reflects exactly a different moment of my life where the urge to transform my artistic and professional practice was forcing me into a creative mutation, which definitely brought me to the current stage of my work in 2026, where I’m experimenting and expanding my world through Artificial Intelligence.
Looking back at the trilogy as a whole, what questions about identity, perception, and life within networked technologies remain unresolved for you?
To be honest and direct, I don’t think there are unresolved questions about identity and perception. The open threads are what make the work function. If we treat those topics as data and categorise them as needing an endpoint, we’re on the other side of what I’m proposing: expansion, liberation, and openness to transformation. The works exist to awaken those topics, not to resolve them. It’s less about discovering who is watching us and more about why I fear becoming something I hate so much. Is the liberation that comes within it? Or is it simply the loss of control (data) of my current identity?
The first edition of Videobrasil’s The Curatorial Cycle unfolds across both digital and public space, presenting Cribb’s moving-image trilogy online while bringing BUGs (2023) to the façade of São Paulo’s Museu de Arte Contemporânea da Universidade de São Paulo (MAC USP) as a monumental urban projection. The exhibition runs until August 3, 2026.
