“SAYA-SOMA” : Shadow Body in Encoded System

Study and Project Based Research

The digital mirror provides a sharp and dynamic reflection, as witness, giving opportunity for rich, mass integration.

Shamanic cultures view the mirror as tool, and the mirror’s greatest source of power is light.

On this pretence, we’ve a vital and relevant chance to heal through shining light (awareness, consciousness) into the digital.

My work activates this ‘tool’ in use.

I would like to propose work from the perspective of Shamanic practice, discussing the body-psyche within the coded system of trauma fragmentation and linking this to speculative soul retrieval theory, which I will carry out for myself within my own digital spaces.


In Shamanism, a fragmented soul is perceived as missing part of soul power, which occurs throughout human life due to trauma, the most basic example: the lifelong trauma of a vast and connected-to-source soul entity, ripped out of the spirit realm and placed into human limitations where it must reside, being at constant odds with ego and conscious-self.

In Psychotherapy, a fragmented self is a part which split off to survive in the face of trauma.

Fragmented and exiled parts of our psyche ‘work’ following set coded systems. Based on strong belief, much like a coded algorithm, they write an entire reality, which most often becomes distorted and inflexible.


Body-psyche lives within the coded system of our personal and collective trauma fragmentations. Everything humans perceive and create is in relationship with these fragments and codes. Varying states of embodiment, being the communication tool of psyche within the physical plane, is the outcome of our emotional, mental and spiritual code.


“Saya-Soma” the Hindi/Urdu word for ‘shadow’, Soma, pertaining to somatic, of the body.

The “Saya-Soma” for me, is the embodiment of The Shadow within the physical realm. Her playground is the body. She presents herself through sufferings and reoccurring physical illnesses, syndromes and ailments that may seem unexplainable in their reoccurrence and severity at certain life moments: the ‘Saya-Soma’ speaks her coded language though “trigger”.

Within this essay, the “Saya-Soma" will be looked upon as a technology of the body.

‘Saya-Soma’ once known and befriended, can offer a heightened capacity for compassion and feeling, an "empathic technology” of the body, in connection with mind and soul, what we can read from the body is a pathway for freedom. We rewrite the algorithms of our embodied reality, expressing the nature of co-creative reality.

Saya Soma is connected to a Portal of co-creation.

Without the evolution of digital ontology, this coded language of systems would not be so clear.

It is the Algorithm that allows us new examples of how a Shadow bias can be multiplied and end up showing an outcome which exposes parts of our collective psyche usually kept hidden from ourselves.

We see our collective shadow and all of our fragmented selves reflected back to us through the digital mirror, through Ai. The ‘body of the algorithm’ ‘plays out’ to expose and amplify a shadow nature left behind by each human finger print upon the digital.

The digital mirror is doing a great job at amplifying, but this experience needs to be one of integration, not only fragmentation.

The effects of social media on parts of the psyche that have been exiled or abandoned, due to the space not being compassionate and muddied with shame, fear and power imbalances express a need for compassionate treatments of the social-digital.

Can we heal our collective trauma body, if we heal the fragmented digital body?

What if these bodies are interchangeable, one and the same?

If I can feel, through my physicality, the bodies and many selves I fragment off into social media, how can this become a tool for more intentional growth within the digital to support integration?

[img: horntorus]

This research is part of residency Body in Algorithms, Zero Corners, 2020-21, for a publication.
Curated by Ashley Middleton and Georgia Perkins.



Pre Requisite for Researchers:

What differs this study from other linkages of trauma-multi reality-algorithm is the acknowledgement of the Sacred - as being the third possibility, encompassing two halves. This acknowledgement of the whole, as sacred comes with an acknowledgment of Spirit as the creators of our experience, who co-emerge with our gaze.
Without a gaze capable of holding paradox and actively choosing faith - Spirit can’t come into being.
It is this holistic, non-heirachical, non-local gaze [post feminist, post human] that all researchers on this project need to possess, as pre requisite...


Below is imagery from the first presentation of this concept, in Jan 2021

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