APHRODISIAC

Artist Statement by Maro Vedava

Media Priestess Arts

2025

 

Introduction

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Desire! Pure and Holy

For Beauty, Life, Love.

An Aphrodisiac Ancestral, Astral

The Primordial Essence of the Soul.

Eros, Pathos, Chronos

The Universal Forces of Rise and Fall.

How Reality is Born?

Surrender, Remember and Explore

In Form, the Blissful Turn On.

Twirling Between Laughs and Cries,

Gliding through Ecstatic Timelines

And Orgasmic Lay lines,

Following the Flow to Where I Belong.

 

I will not conform, in the wrong!

Cause I’m Pure and I Love.

That’s the Truth, Come along!

Is this Real or just a Simulation?

 

Aphrodisiac is a media priestess artwork expressed in visual form as a digital image and a video. It begins as an embodied homage to the Goddess of Love — an invocation and an exploration of the priestess-artist’s “turn on”: the most intimate experience of union with the shakti energy/lifeforce, that leads to healing through desire, pleasure, play, love, and ecstatic sensuality. Through video and different AI processes, this aphrodisiac allure transmutes into revealing the aphrodisiac hazard of the modern world’s everyday reality — the reality where the priestess lives.

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The digital image is like a mosaic, consisting of visual elements like photographs, paintings, AI-generated images, and hand-drawn digital painting. The priestess-artist invokes Aphrodite through a ritual posture inspired by a Minoan mudra as embodied during a ceremony of calling back Ariadne through her 47 ancient names (Aphrodite being one of them), during an international priestess event.  In the picture, she is immersed in the imaginal realm of her turn on, attuning to her higher vibrations of existence by blending ritual and myth, the embodied and the artificial, reality and phantasy - in meaning, form and aesthetics.

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The video consists of smaller videos generated through different AI processes that used, as input, different parts(frames) of the digital mosaic. Some of these frames were also used as the basis for generating new images, which then generated new videos. The final editing blends the original with the artificial and through the collaboration of priestess-artist-AI and the presence of Goddess - Spirit, we are guided to see the truth.

Artificial Intelligence offers us so many opportunities for graceful evolution through collaboration. At the same time, it has been created in an era led by the disembodied ego - whose need for more and more and more has led the state of the planet into imbalance, and humanity into sickness, illusion, hatred and psychic imprisonment. Reality and simulation are merging into one. What is the simulation showing? What do we perceive as reality? And what can help us in telling them apart?

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Aphrodisiac is the 5th media priestess artwork in the line of previous works like Devada’s Gifts (2017) and Vedava’s Snake Charm (2021) that document the spiritual and artistic journey of a contemporary media priestess.

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The sacred performance was created by the Cretan priestess Eirini Delaki in collaboration with Alexandra’s Cichon’s research on the ancient Minoan names of the Goddess. It took place during Priestess Convocation 2024 in Crete, Greece. Referred to with permission.

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Music used in Aphrodisiac video:

Selenge (Telematic Remix), Female Laptop Orchestra, Oceans Reimagined, Various Artists & Ethernet Orchestra, 2022 (Creative commons)

Shunyata, Thos Grol , VA Shunyata, Shunyata Records, 2016 (used with permission of the artist)

Music used in Vedava’s Snake Charm and Devada’s Gifts:

Bass Ritual (CØNTRA REMIX), David Starfire, Bloomurian, Nizhoni, Mah Ze Tar, Contra, 2025 (used with permission by David Starfire)