THE CYBORG MATR [b. 2013] BY NIKKI JUEN
Submitted in partial fulfillment of the requirements for the Master of Fine Arts in Visual Art Program at Vermont College of Fine Arts.
Submitted on July 17, 2016
__________________________ Advisor, Michelle Dizon PhD
__________________________ Faculty Co-Chair, Dont Rhine
NIKKI JUEN
THE CYBORG MATR [b. 2013]
TABLE OF CONTENTS Acknowledgements Process Paper Cuts, Ruptures, and Pain Matr Aesthesia Cyborg Studio Work Stills Artist Statement[s] Bibliography Colophon
ACKNOWLEDGEMENTS Thank you to the Vermont College of Fine Arts Senior Staff and my many friends on the campus. VCFA is my home away from home in Montpelier, Vermont. #vcfalove I extend a warm embrace to my beloved colleagues at VCFA and RISD for your many concessions while I undertook this work. Thanks to my VCFA thesis advisor Michelle Dizon for calmly providing a fruitful site of intensity. Additional thanks are extended to former faculty and studio advisors: Luis Jacob, Faith Wilding, Viet Le, Elizabeth Duffy, Cauleen Smith, Patty Chang, and Marie Shurkus. Thanks to my undergraduate students at RISD and my graduate advisees at VCFA. Love to my Post Kool Aid Discourse, this O.T.B. could not have done it without each of you. Love to the Grandmothers, the Great-Grandmothers, and my extended Juen and Attias families. Amalia, Ezra, and Rafael I love you so; you are the wind beneath my wings. Or armpits. Either way, it’s a refreshing, cool wind. This work is dedicated to Joann and Peter Juen, the talented makers, confidantes, and inspirations who always believe in me. The Cyborg Matr is copyright Š Nikki Juen 2016. The work of other authors is included in this Masters in Fine Arts Thesis for the Vermont College of Fine Arts under the Fair Use Guidelines for Educational Multimedia. This book may not be reproduced in whole or in part, in any form. nikkijuen.com
« DIALECTICS IS THE ART THAT INVITES US TO RECUPERATE ALIENATED PROPERTIES. » —Gilles Deleuze
CUTS, RUPTURES, AND PAIN
20/25 120/70 180 Through the cuts, ruptures, and pain of living in a human body emerges the individual as a conversation with the environment. From these intrusions comes the question of a human operating system that seeks to know what humans might become based on assembled relationships, unfixed boundaries, and inhospitable futures.
20/866 61/41 8.11 I was born in 2013.
20/25 120/70 172 Off to the south there is a star that at bedtime settles itself between the big white pine and the copse of maples on the front hill. From my pillow I alternate opening and closing my eyes, wondering if distance or near sight will better capture the light that appears momentarily wiped off the inked sky by winter’s bare branches. Since this light set off on its journey so many years ago, I squint hard trying to match its great efforts, concentrating dim hope on distant carbon, willing it to the surface of my eye. There is grief in looking at stars: they are remnants, future borne memories of objects that no longer exist. The photons that enter my eyes through slit lids are focused on the retina. The retina cells capture low black and white light contracting image to optic nerve, a stretch of lonely highway between the part of my brain you can see and that sees you and the one that processes the image of you.
The harder I look the less I see.
I wonder if clouds have rolled in from the bay or if in the earth’s rotation, the star is playing hide-and-seek behind the trees. Searching the space between the waving branches I see her flickering again. Trying to fix on her faint glow, I get worried that I’ve found a field of degeneration in my eye — a black hole — a common occurrence in someone with eighty-year old eyes, like me. I try again and find that I am satisfied looking past her into the grand void, into the black space beyond the branches and in between the saga of the stars. In the constellation of my body, the dura mater is the outermost layer that encloses the brain and spinal cord as it carries blood from the heart. If I hold my gaze softly averted I see the star brighter than ever as she vibrates in whole starbursts of light that careen around like rainbows in my seeing eye brain.
I close my eyes, and in the black darkness of no vision, I see everything with only my heart.
80/400 120/70 155 I opened my eyes and I was blind.
A heavy velvet curtain had descended on my sight, its scream dampening approach lowered itself, thick and black like a still new-moon night. On that cold winter’s day in the icy beginning of my second semester as a college freshman, I was going blind. I hadn’t yet learned to panic so after I stopped trying to wipe away the blind from the outside, I spent the next few hours on the phone with health services attempting to locate any eye doctor that would see me on a weekend. There was urgency in the voices of the nurses I spoke with and in the placating tones I started to hear the darkness that was lurking just behind my head. Its hands firmly on the rope stage-left as the weight of the sandbag disappeared into the holy loft of the stage ceiling.
Drops, waiting, bright lights, more drops, alone.
An obedient student, dilation forces the pupil open, flooding the eye with light. I’m thankful for the dim light of this strange office, with its dark wood and tall-backed churchy chairs, I need this imposing architecture as my own infrastructure starts to dissolve. I start to grope my way through trauma, unknowingly free-falling into the wisdoms of the body’s breakdown. In the microstructures of the eye the vast preponderance of darkness receiving rods line up like dim soldiers, obedient and sure in their efforts that say: even if all the light in the world could flood the vitreous, we humans would still not be able to see.
So distant are we in what we think we know.
The crenelated aperture of the iris may be the most intriguing opening I know in the experience of the body. Reacting without cognition, it controls how much light enters the body and when. Now, however, I want to force it shut, I want to pull both ends of the hoodie strings and have it close, tight and dark, I want to disappear inside its fleece folds.
Having always worn glasses or contact lenses, I am accustomed to feeling the heat from a doctor’s skin or the moisture of breath and even the cold edge of a scope millimeters from my eye. Used to touching the surface of my eye, I am flinch-less in this environment and everything is achingly familiar, an unbidden and discomfiting knowledge. But he’s sitting too close now that the examination is over and with his knees dovetailing mine, I learn I am coming apart. In the dim, stale glow of this increasingly unfamiliar place, boundaries become ghosts.
5.21.16 A boundary is an erected device that separates and divides: cultures, contexts, ideas, and people, functioning as something negative and something through which marginalized and oppressed people have had to leave through or move under, in defiance.
Artist and author Trinh T. Minh-ha says that another way to understand boundaries is to “get out of the realm of the material and see the boundary as something that could be very immaterial.” This could mean something entirely temporal and calls into question the movement between visibility and invisibility. Using the example of twilight Minh-ha calls the space between dark and light the space where experiences get transformed and act as a passage leading to an elsewhere — an impasse as aberration. “Indicative of the two extremes of a thing or an event, the third term carries with it the potential to change the term of every duality. In other words, it enables one to displace duality and reinscribe it as difference.” [Minh-ha]
“The contemporary is the one whose eyes are struck by the beam of darkness that comes from [their] own time,
...distancing and nearness, which define contemporariness, have foundation in this proximity to the origin that nowhere pulses with more force than the present.
...The poet, insofar as [they are] contemporary, is the fracture, is at once that which impedes time from composing itself and the blood that must suture this break or this wound.� —Giorgio Agamben
The darkness is inescapable — there is an intelligence in going towards the shadow, to make the dark precisely the very light of becoming.
MONET REFUSES THE OPERATION Doctor, you say there are no haloes around the streetlights in Paris and what I see is an aberration caused by old age, an affliction. I tell you it has taken me all my life to arrive at the vision of gas lamps as angels, to soften and blur and finally banish the edges you regret I don’t see, to learn that the line I called the horizon does not exist and sky and water, so long apart, are the same state of being. Fifty-four years before I could see Rouen cathedral is built of parallel shafts of sun, and now you want to restore my youthful errors: fixed notions of top and bottom, the illusion of three-dimensional space, wisteria separate from the bridge it covers.
What can I say to convince you the Houses of Parliament dissolve night after night to become the fluid dream of the Thames? I will not return to a universe of objects that don’t know each other, as if islands were not the lost children of one great continent. The world is flux, and light becomes what it touches, becomes water, lilies on water, above and below water, becomes lilac and mauve and yellow and white and cerulean lamps, small fists passing sunlight so quickly to one another that it would take long, streaming hair inside my brush to catch it. To paint the speed of light! Our weighted shapes, these verticals, burn to mix with air and change our bones, skin, clothes
to gases. Doctor, if only you could see how heaven pulls earth into its arms and how infinitely the heart expands to claim this world, blue vapor without end. —Lisel Mueller
80/400 120/70 155 I had been home for merely a half-day and I was sick enough the night before the rupture that my mom was sleeping with me. It must have been bad because I don’t remember her ever doing that before or after. By the morning I was vomiting green bile and writhing on the white couch under the blue sky bay window. Through the blinding red haze of pain my mom asks me if I need to go to the hospital. I say yes. We hobble to the maroon car, and I’m blank until the test.
The test for a ruptured appendix is deceptively low-tech. It involves the doctor pressing his finger into the patient’s tender lower-right abdomen. While this additional abdominal intrusion is itself achingly bad, after a count of let’s say ten, the doctor quickly removes his finger and all the rot that has been displaced rushes right back to the pain receptors that are driving you two stops past madness.
Fucking medicine. Ruptured. And I’m out cold until I wake up in recovery. Or my room.
Or recovery.
It’s impossible to know. A ruptured appendix in 1983 means a week in the hospital, which means a week of hospital food and sleeping alone in a very strange place. If you’ve ever spent time in a hospital you know that it is not a place of recovery. Your skin pulls itself back together and swelling responds to all manner of intravenous delights that keep you still and keep your heart pumping. But while the physical biologic healing happens in this sterile? environment — healing from the trauma is another story.
The pain will remain sheath-like on muscles mixed with a cocktail of fear that you never knew hours before. Those phantoms will echo in what has been removed for years to come. There are stabbing pains in a part of your teenage body that you have not yet discovered. In the system of fascia that’s been violated, the body searches for its new connections and the warning shots that are fired teach me to hold my breath for the first time.
And I learn to leave my body.
When they closed me up, suturing two apertures above my right pelvic rim, they leave a latex tube as drain. Surgery is violent and with the rupture you are jettisoned from the familiar at the realization that you can choose to not inhabit your own biology. A place for the putrid to escape was also a route into my cavity that became my primary understanding of the body as a site of filtration and infiltration with the outside world.
This body doesn’t just excrete, void, and slough off. On the contrary, the largest organ, the skin, also devours and is devoured by its environment. In this fragility, publicness, and finitude, I begin to feel illnesses and dis/ease take the stage in my body from historical, social, and political forces.
The week after the surgery, with the abdominal drain removed, I was released from the hospital with squatters under my skin. A parting gift from the hospital, the little bastard Scabies, an infection of sub-dermal mites, made their way up and down my body in fiery swollen patches. I writhed in discomfort and disgust as the milky cream that I had to rub from head to toe in every fold made them die inside me. Apertures sewn shut. Still under my skin their carcasses suspended in space between follicle and fat, entombed remnants of the rupture.
My very own army, housed within.
Fast forward to 23 and those once aching connections tie themselves noose tight around my small bowel. Another long-bileish-night-of-the-soul in the soulless bowel that is an emergency room and my small intestines are run by a Brown University surgical team, as they lay outside my body.
Adhesions neatly trimmed, I have my third invasion.
If you’ve ever watched a car windshield crack, you know the fissure happens quietly: over time, in silence, and with a stare of disbelief.
80/400 120/70 155 This body is a site of trauma and foreign material woven from the experience of being a human. With an already tenuous grip on this body, a woman’s body, my final eviction via illness was complete in 1987. In places, made up of manufactured polymers by substances refined from fossil fuels — extracted from the earth — my reclaimed eyesight starts to resemble a buttress inhabiting the biology. I wouldn’t be here without the forces of technology, science, and western medicine on my body. The questions were cast as the skin knit itself back together: how will I inhabit this invaded, occupied, objectified, fallible body? And how will this body inhabit an increasingly inhospitable biosphere?
Theorist Katherine Hayles believes we became post-human a long time ago and that idea does not necessarily portend an apocalyptic end to humans; rather it calls into question the set of constructs that posture the perceived boundaries of the human subject. Boundaries always have been fluid, translucent, morphing.
Hayles writes, “within the dialectic of pattern/randomness and grounded in embodied actuality rather than disembodied information, the post-human offers resources for rethinking the articulation of humans with intelligent machines.�
This is not Artificial Intelligence, this is not Armageddon, this is the information age. The tips of our fingers may have known long ago that a certain concept of human is precisely what is at stake, the potential of which can be seen at the edges of our conceptual understanding, in the places where we are alike and which the internet as network elucidates.
“Dystopian fears connected to the evolution of human corporeality into a bioinformatic system stem from an unwillingness to imagine ourselves as other than what the humanist ideal has posited. Afraid of losing a core of humanity, we insist on individual positions despite the way in which that individuality is filtered through cultural sieves, formed in language, and executed in stylized gestures we did not invent. Bodies and selves that move through states of containment, mangled commingling, and back again, even if horrifying to imagine and dangerous to clear definitions of humanness, comprise the nature of the bioinformatic form.� —April Durham
What is me? What is them? What is we?
In the video work of artist Natalie Bookchin, these questions and the idea of the individual start to erode, recognizing as we might, that we have moved that way too. With the awkward and masterful gesticulations of the subjects the happysad biomass of human is lovingly — if painfully — displayed. To be human, in this viewing, is to see the bared intimacy on parade as it reveals its history in the collective pain of a nation and the pain served by politics of oppression and separation. In Bookchin’s video compilations we see the effect of culture on behavior and how they are not at all separate. We see the network of television become the network of personal expression via the simulated acts of hyper-sexualized movement. Movements that simultaneously signal youthful desire and self-witnessing and the slim-pickings of visual languages that proliferate in popular culture.
And popular culture is culture.
The boundaries of skin, the cell structure of the surface of the eye, the membrane of the inner ears and the neuronal tips of our nervous system become a brief selection of the primary locations of rupture in thinking that humans are somehow separate from the greater bio-body of the planet.
Hito Steyerl’s vision of resolution [as in DPI, JPG, and PPI] is a form of affect and thus a societal and cultural commodity. Meaning that with the loss of resolution across platforms “poor images are thus popular images — images that can be made and seen by the many. They express all the contradictions of the contemporary crowd: its opportunism, narcissism, desire for autonomy and creation, its inability to focus or make up its mind, its constant readiness for transgression and simultaneous submission. Altogether, poor images present a snapshot of the affective condition of the crowd, its neurosis, paranoia, and fear, as well as its craving for intensity, fun, and distraction. The condition of the images speaks not only of countless transfers and reformattings, but also of the countless people who cared enough about them to convert them over and over again, to add subtitles, reedit, or upload them.”
MATR
20/25 120/70 180 Matr dissolves the physical object and/or subject into motion, relationship, and agency. As a conjunctive word meaning mother: it affixes, joins, and validates multiplicities.
The Matr recognizes that in the domestic lies the power to move between the immaterial and the material — from matter to matr — to collaborate, feed, nurture and educate.
The Matr did not know the great-great-grandmothers and won’t know the great-great granddaughters.
9.10.15 Ashton, was it the first time that I met you or one of your subsequent visits where you were obsessively returning to write at the very table that I sit at now? I think Jack was here, I think it might have been my birthday too and there were therefore many mini-excursions to collect supplies and such. I have always been envious of that obsession for the written word that I saw you practice that weekend. I never understood it either. It’s taken me years to feel it. Now I sit at the same table and I wish there were more hours in the current day to fill the pages.
I close my eyes and take my brain offline as I need a word. The right word. I sip coffee which has stopped working and wine which works too quickly.
I tear up and I think of old young friends.
MATR: matrix
alma mater
matriarch
dura mater
matrices
matronage
matricidal
matromorphic
matriculate
matronym
materfamilias
matrophile
matrilineal
nearomatria
matrimonial
opsimatria
matrimonies
matrolagnia
matrocliny
misomater
nonmatriculated
matter
10.12.13 This is the story borne of the not-darkness that laid me stone still, eyes bandaged, learning new fluencies of perception. Letters, words, and sentences string neatly together in the linearity of language and fail in expressing the outside of time, light, and dimension. The old tongues — alphabets and other symbols — don’t offer enough dimension to explain what presented itself.
The old language of forms of the built world are still in place because I had the previous experience of seeing them but this database is useless in the unseen other than to keep shins from getting bruised.
This is the story of learning to walk down hallways by counting steps that grew into the dream of surrendering the oppression of sequence and accepting an invitation to synesthetic realms. This is the magic density of air or ether as a color and an indicator that common surfaces are solid or void. This is seeing music in vast planes of light that intersect rhythmically in the space mountain of imagination. This is smelling the vibratory heat of a candle and feeling the texture and volumic mass of food as it becomes body. This is knowing the scent of warp and weft. This is the idea of under-you having hundreds or thousands of possibilities and in-front-of-you being a question with no answer.
This is the story of non-locality of experience. This was the first time I saw the plenipotiential [Martin] of being multiple things at once. No gender, race, profession, religion, class, role, style, physical attribute, boundary but the steam from a boiling tea kettle dissipating into the cool air, the sound of wind moving with still leaves, the silence between notes, movement as voids of other bodies in the house and the space extending in all directions. The notion of self was. Time doesn’t matter and it certainly isn’t matter and it had no tyrannical affect on my experience of who or where I was. And while I was fully in my body, I was also multiple feet away from my body in all directions.
A emanation freed from the base forces of science.
“...the power of the body to vibrate to the music of the universe, to the composition of affects that play ‘live’ in our subjectivity. Our consistency is made up of these compositions as they create themselves over and over again, inspired by the aspects of which the world affect us. The vibrating body is therefore that which, within us, is both the inside and the outside at the same time, The inside being nothing more than a fleeting combination of the outside.” —Suely Rolnik
6.3.14 There must be a word or theory for the space ahead of an arrow or a boat’s bow where matter is pushed forward or split in two. The space between the object and the atmospheric that is not a thing yet necessary. A place before friction like the heatsheild on a space capsule as it reenters the planet’s atmosphere, the glowing incandescence that is not part of the object even as it moves forward on the same path, not part of the matter it divides.
Heat and shocked gas.
Matter itself forges the Matr.
“At extreme conditions of reality and matter — the microcosmic and the macrocosmic — objectivity seems to vanish and the observer becomes, literally, part of the experiment, determining the outcome.
‘The observer,’ in the words of John Archibald Wheeler, ‘is inescapably promoted to participator. In some strange sense, this is a participatory universe. Mankind has an unavoidable roll in creating the reality of the universe.’” —Calvin Luther Martin
2.8.14 I am amused at the magical web of thoughts that I produce that lie to me about my complicit reliance on technology. My memory for specific events is permeated with feelings from myself and others so that the resultant memories are compound pictures of a truth.
The web of ME/DIA.
I am faced squarely with a tangible whole in which I can no longer talk about an experience of self without also talking about connections to webs, technology, and media. Perhaps quite instinctively and in an effort to find a momentarily solid ground to explore from, I tune my senses to nature.
The heart of a blue whale alone is the size of a Volkswagen Beetle. Blue whale, scientific name, balaenoptera musculus, is an important reference for multiple reasons. An audio recording of blue whales is known to be the loudest sound ever produced by an animal, causing scientists to speculate that in addition to its role in global navigation and minute prey detection, the sound may also account for the whale’s ability to express feelings and keep in touch with other whales many miles away. Amazingly, this behemoth creature lives on collecting and eating tons of microscopic plankton and tiny shrimplike crustaceans called krill. Krill live in groups called effusions. There is an interesting relationship between scale and distance at play here in both the many miles that the whale’s calls travel through the ocean and the persistent efforts it must exhibit to collect tons of food daily.
In my mind, I trace the arcs of sound and feeding patterns and the oceans start to fill with interconnected stories told in forgotten languages.
“We may think of the sensing body as a kind of an open circuit that completes itself only in things and in the world. The differentiation of my senses, as well as their spontaneous convergence in the world at large, ensures that I am being destined for relationship: it is primarily through my engagement with what is not me that I effect the integration of my senses, and thereby experience my own unity and coherence.� —David Abram
That the internet is a web of fiber optic cables laying on the ocean floor is a new fact to me. I came upon this fact, as one does these days, on the internet itself; coming to know about the stuff of transmission in the armature of information’s transmission is a rather interesting time-loop. This is where the potential for futurist power fantasy enters and the intangible becomes momentarily material.
Online, there is an interactive map that shows the current web of cables and how they connect the various continents. Because of the reliability and speed of these roughly 299 undersea cables, they’ve become a literal web of global economic connection. As one moves the interactive slider from right to left, a map of ocean trade routes from 1912 is revealed and it is both the same and different; one is a trace and the other a magnet, though both can easily be considered the other.
Trade routes, the connection of the planet via commodification and money, the net of my senses in the world, the routes that bring the objects to my doorstep, either via contrail or fiber optics.
I remember the world as small again.
“When a female human is born, she has one kind of structure; when she enters puberty, she has another; if she contracts a disease, she has still another. But throughout her lifetime, her organization remains the same: that which is characteristic of a living human. Only when death occurs does her organization change.� —Katherine Hayles
8.23.15 I remember watching the women. I remember seeing the way PTA mothers, fund-raising committee mothers, drama club moms competed and jostled each other for the validation of doing the most, baking the best, trying to wrestle the beast of control, watching what I could not at the time put my finger on. I wonder just how many times I have seen the over-eager and anxiety-ridden parenting that I witnessed as my children grew. I remember the times I tried to find a home in this cycle for myself. Things I bought, disingenuous conversations I kept up, and the herculean efforts I made to find validation in mothering white America.
I think I survived by a thread and by the one thing that no mother can ever foresee in the litany of decisions that are made around raising children. I survived simply because my children matured and with their growing autonomy I saw value as it existed outside of, what was for me, a perilous system.
I realize I only understood this through Them, in relationship with Them. It is precisely because of Them that the daring step was taken, the step away from the tragic cycle.
00/00 000/00 000 “The circularity of the feminine project will not escape you, therefore: it is a perfect form, a sphere infused with activities of ongoing circuits of attachment that can at the same time look like and feel like a zero.” —Lauren Berlant
Preying on the effects of consciousness raising communities and the ways that women confide and bond with each other, capitalism capitalizes on a female sense of community. Women’s innate sense of community is precisely what commercial forces activate to create pseudo-lasting-values in objects, economy, and simply living in the world.
Lauren Berlant’s ‘intimate public’ is what occurs when a potential market opens up, a location of communal feeling with assumed similarities and priorities and attachments to the way things are perceived and experienced. As a group, the intimate public attends to the struggle of present living as they, at the same time, long for the way to a normal. That unmet unattainable yearning becomes the dissatisfaction that Berlant offers is the female complaint.
It’s a vicious cycle as the complaint becomes experience, which is then evidence, which sustains the argument, which seeks convention, which becomes its own cliché in a never-ending and self-fulfilling cycle of disappointment.
I RAISE, AND I AM RAISED
I study,
I cower,
and I am studied.
and I am cowered.
I tolerate,
I piss,
and I am tolerated.
and I am pissed.
I eat,
I dance,
and I am eaten.
and I am danced.
I live,
I hurt,
and I am lived.
and I am hurt.
I hope,
I cry,
and I am hoped.
and I am cried.
I die,
I buy,
and I am dead.
and I am bought.
I desire,
I kill,
and I am desired.
and I am killed.
I bargain,
I learn,
and I am bargained.
and I am learned.
I run,
I wander,
and I am run.
and I am wandered.
I drive,
I love,
and I am driven.
and I am loved.
I fight,
I surveil,
and I am fought.
and I am surveilled.
I sell,
I suck,
and I am sold.
and I am sucked.
I wish,
I hate,
and I am wished.
and I am hated.
I fuck,
I hurry,
and I am fucked.
and I am hurried.
I breathe,
I pacify,
and I am breathed.
and I am pacified.
I escape,
I raise,
and I am escaped.
and I am raised.
I leap,
I laugh,
and I am leapt.
and I am laughed.
I burn,
I shit,
and I am burned.
and I am shit.
I ruin,
I judge,
and I am ruined.
and I am judged.
I weep,
I seethe,
and I am wept.
and I am seethed.
I sigh,
I extricate,
and I am sighed.
and I am extricated.
I riot,
I implicate,
and I am rioted.
and I am implicated.
I grade,
I manipulate,
and I am graded.
and I am manipulated.
I fear,
I lie,
and I am feared.
and I am lied.
I loathe,
I punch,
and I am loathed.
and I am punched.
I petition,
I hug,
and I am petitioned.
and I am hugged.
I yell,
I order,
and I am yelled.
and I am ordered.
I want,
I destroy,
and I am wanted.
and I am destroyed.
I erase,
I enable,
and I am erased.
and I am enabled.
I behave, and I am behaved.
8.23.15 The self is a constructed set of individual experiences, influences, and biological differences, and that sense of self is not separate from the process of becoming. Constantly in motion. Although we live in time and space, there is little to help this seeking in the linear trajectory that currently defines human understanding. We are made up of multitudes of experiences during our lifetimes, including familial and other influences that construct who we are. These experiences register at multiple levels in the gross physical space and in subtle energetic exchanges.
Here is a snapshot of a kind of organization. The self as a conversation with the environment, its operating systems dependent on the human body.
An understanding that leaves as it begins.
One that changes as it starts, one that unfixed, in-transit and decentralized, starts to understand what human’s may be and what we might become based on assembled relationships.
“Listen: you are not yourself, you are crowds of others, you are as leaky a vessel as was ever made, you have spent vast amounts of your life as someone else, as people who died long ago, as people who never lived, as strangers you never met.” —Rebecca Solnit
7.5.13 In the matrilineal generations I have known in my lifetime, all four of us share/d an uncommon joy for voicing neologisms. Neologisms are made-up words and expressions.
Until recently, I had always attributed ‘the making up words again’ to the pervasive dyslexia that extends on either side of my place in the biologic line-up; because if your brain can’t process a written word, making up language seems a natural expression of this experience. I also chalk it up to the multiple emigrations from Austria, Italy, and Germany and my own marriage to a South American, which means we all grew up in sporadically bilingual homes. We conflate words and ideas between the continents and feel the limits and the agony of language [Glissant] on our tongues.
Layers of the familiar infiltrate foreign place and time, as one and the other toss on the same tongue.
I see that this poetic authorship, even when unintentional, seeks to write our relationships when language fails the complexity and intimacy of experience.
My own use of words — conditioned by histories of binaries, oppositions, dichotomies, divisions — calls for a new relationship to language and a resistance to assumptions deeply embedded in everyday conversation.
My struggle with the language of the academy in which I teach, tells me in its own words how it does not afford women an equal seat at the table. I abrade at stacks of scientific ‘surety,’ each with their requisite eviction of feeling and intuition.
There is of course my own fear of putting into black and white words ideas that begin again just as they have finished: endless constellations of thoughts that to live must not be oppressed by static strings of words.
Technology has accelerated this new word/phrase/meaning auto-authoring and over dinner this past weekend my mother and I had my daughter turn off the auto-correct feature on our smart phones; it is imperative to the becoming of our neo-languages. “...when a people speaks its languages, it is above all free to produce through them at every level—free, that is, to make its relationship to the world concrete and visible for itself and for others.� [Glissant] That the imposition of auto-correct, intended to accelerate the process of typing short messages in service of recognizing words that you type most often, actually impairs our freedom to recognize our languaging as a form of becoming.
DYSTOPOP Performative music best characterized by Lorde, who has cemented her place in the art pop music industry with her signature indifference while simultaneously criticizing mainstream popular culture.
PLAIDAPATHY Describes the rampant artisanally-crafted gaze of nonchalance witnessed often in Brooklyn, New York.
PROTENTIAL Within every problem lies a potential.
SURGEONT The mashup of words ‘surgeon’ and ‘urgent’ both perfect and premonitory of the post-surgical pain that would accompany my grandmother for the last five years of her life.
FAMTASTIC Texting has upped my mother’s neologic game as she or her smartphone put the ‘family’ in ‘fantastic.’
“...écriture féminine is thus a fundamentally political strategy designed to redress the wrongs of culture through a revalidation of the rights of nature.” —Hélèn Cixous and Catherine Clément
“Sun/Moon Culture/Nature Day/Night Father/Mother Head/Heart Intelligible/Palpable Logos/Pathos. Form, convex, step, advance, semen, progress. Matter, concave, ground — where steps are taken, holding — and, dumping-ground. Man ———— Woman”
—Hélèn Cixous and Catherine Clément
“A feminine text cannot not be more than subversive: if it writes itself it is in volcanic heaving of the old ‘real’ property crust. In ceaseless displacement. She must write herself because, when the time comes for her liberation, it is in the invention of a new, insurgent writing that will allow her to put the breaks and indispensable changes into effect in her history. At first, individually, on two separate levels: — woman, writing herself will go back to this body that has been worse than confiscated, a body replaced with a disturbing stranger, sick or dead, who so often is a bad influence, the cause and place of inhibitions. By censoring the body, breath and speech are censored at the same time...
“To write — the act that will ‘realize’ the un-censored relationship of woman to her sexuality, to her woman-being, giving her back access to her own forces; that will return her goods; her pleasures; her organs, her vast bodily territories kept under seal; that will tear her out of the superegoed, over-Mosesed structure where the same position of guilt is always reserved for her (guilty of everything, every time: of having desires, of not having any; of being frigid, of being ‘too’ hot; of not being both at once; of being too much of a mother and not enough; of nurturing and of not nurturing...). Write yourself: your body must make itself heard. Then the huge resources of the unconscious will burst out. Finally the inexhaustible feminine Imaginary is going to be deployed. Without gold or black dollars, our naphtha will spread values over the world, un-quoted values that will change the rules of the old game.” —Hélèn Cixous and Catherine Clément
20/25 120/70 180 I breathe deeper and slower in a new appreciation of how my artwork has often included words. My design work is generally centered around the text of others, and more-so now with the recognition of designer as author, my own words are what I work with. In my art practice before grad school I felt little or no need to justify the entertaining inclusion of words.
However now, I am proud and feel more deeply woven into the reclamation against the histories that have only felt vaguely oppressive and out of focus.
My position changes.
In this country alone, the violence is currently accelerating, scared of what chases it. The privileges that exists in both race and gender (to name only two intentionally) create violences with their own silence. By keeping quiet in the face of horrific murders in Ferguson, Missouri and Charleston, South Carolina that have taken place during the past year alone, apathy becomes compliance. I feel I must write, I must use media, I must not be a silent participant in the violence perpetrated in privilege and apathy.
This country is fighting for its own breath and forgetting that we are all breathing together.
Light and dark Good and bad Success and failure Right and wrong Female and male Negative and positive Mind and body Human and nature
We can choose to see words as language in a conceptual and moral opposition, corralled momentarily within their own circles. We can watch the circles move towards each other, their circumferences coming into frictional proximity near the void but never overlapping, never becoming a both. Always one foot in and one foot out. Fascinating that this language as dichotomy relates to the bifurcated concepts of the human body: left/right, proximal/distal, inside/outside, and also female/male.
This location of the body in the language, because of the historical nature of languages to parse and hold a line, the side of which one must choose, but never both, is a fascist authority over the notion of self becoming.
The autonomy of being oppressed by the autocratic words of its own making.
Forcing a framework upon any individual’s experience echoes the limitations that have been met and dismantled during decades of feminist movements.
Language bares itself as a problem here in describing the lacunae of relationship, what is off the grid, what is unnameable specifically because it changes.
Language, often and long afforded too much power, at the same time, lacking in ability to describe the body’s relationship to itself and the world.
“Language is rooted in the body, its meanings inseparable from the sounds and gestures that bore it forth.” — Laura Marks
Our physical world is dynamic not static: it lives and dies in complex ways. Our language, a significant symbol of this world, is also dynamic and always changing. Language need no longer enforce what is no longer an experience of being. Words, whether created by lexicographers, grandmothers, autocorrect, or to precede a yet unnameable experience, may be as unfixed as we are as individuals. Made up of time, experience, nature, accumulated wisdom, luck, collision, force and desire, there is space to perform language and not be merely performed by it.
6.11.14 Looking back fourteen years, I finally notice that I had located the memory of my depression solely in my body and as a faulty disfunction of my own mental chemicals and hygiene. I also rabidly judged and questioned my own will and skill to mother — that memory comes now with a sharp wince. Perhaps that says more about my own personal constitution to self-judge than it says about the public origins of personal feelings but here is where supposition unravels between the perceived personal and the public and the new-to-me notion that they are not at all separate.
2.3.16 Not an August goes by that I don’t think of the ways in which we, as a country, care for some and not for others. In my own depression I struggled with guilt and the privilege of my skin and nation. There are not enough pharmaceuticals combined to tackle that. I don’t for a second think that the recent murders and surges of violence against black Americans are not strung together tenuously on a long necklace of history that more accurately resembles a choker. Each bead rubbed smooth, patina faded in revised histories that stretch back thirty-thousand years. That’s exactly twenty-nine thousand nine hundred and sixty-four years before I was born.
What do I do about that? I realize now that this is one reason why I teach and why August becomes swathed in my own search for a present racial and gender equilibrium. And by equilibrium, I do not mean balance. I mean a state where legs reach an infinite number of varying plateaus and the conversation can be had from many more perspectives than my own.
Motion, agency, and inquiry.
8.29.15 Untethered, skinless, I sorted my way through work and kids and home and partner and family, each with its own set of rules as to how I might live a life. Philosophies of Buddhist living brought tempered comfort but I could not envision living with the void as the practice offers. There seems too much of my complicated householder life to leave if I descended.
Then there was the shame — I couldn’t bring together the dark and the light in a way that wasn’t blinding or panic inducing. I sat for hours and watched the squirrels in my front yard, no, I envied the squirrels in my front yard. They seemed to do one thing all day long and with such devoted attention that they felt sane to me. Focused, attentive, devoted, alert, flexible. The same fucking thing all day long and into the fall until the snow came when they hunkered down for the season with their stores of nuts to sustain them.
I could do that. Except I couldn’t, so I coined the phrase ‘squirrel or Valium.’ I was determined to devote myself to the singularities that I could, not the complexities that I could not.
6.25.2004 Squirrel or Valium.™
9.13.15 During a recent interview I was asked what my preferred medium is as an artist. My first instinct was to say none, preferring instead the proper medium for the problem, the designer in me often trounces on the artist. Luckily, I had a few days to think about the questions as a whole and it occurred to me that education is a preferred medium. Whether I consider it performance [it is], or spoken word [it is too], or school of life [definitely is], it is the action I can take in the world that undeniably reaches people in conversation and seems to carry forward in how individuals choose to live their lives.
My body is media, my body is mediated, and the unfixed location of this understanding is at the surface and just below the skin.
“If Leibniz’s omnivisionary male observer [God] is impotent, then justice is blind to resolution. She carefully runs her fingers over the edges, gaps, and rifts of rugged and glossy images, of low-resolution monads left in fractional space, registering their tectonic profile, feeling their bruises, fully confident that the impossible can and indeed will happen.” —Hito Steyerl
AESTHESIA
20/25 120/70 180 Aesthesia is the normal human ability to experience sensation and perception. This sensitivity can be thought of as a heightened state of present living, one that seeks to subvert and reconfigure the dominant understanding of bodies, organs, feelings, health, machines, and networks.
11.15.15 I recall a story of an anthropologist going to do his field studies amongst an indigenous tribe in Indonesia. He told the story of where he would park his car based on where he had heard the tribe might be located, since as a nomadic tribe, they moved as the trees told them to. The anthropologist arrived at the edge of a remote road prepared to spend days searching for the location of the tribe and was surprised to see a tribe member waiting for him. As the anthropologist approached the man, the man turned in silence to begin what would be a multiple days long hike to a remote location. Along the walk the anthropologist had the occasion to ask how the man had known both how and where he would be arriving? The man turned to him and countered by saying how could he not know?
2.28.16 Artist and theorist Anna Munster introduced me to the word ‘aesthesia’ to describe the ability to feel or perceive sensations, as opposed to anesthesia which is defined as a lack of awareness of sensitivity. Further, if anesthesia is an unconsciousness, a paralysis, and a loss of memory, aesthesia can be thought of as a heightened state of present living in connection to an individual experience and that in this connection as network we can begin to write new ways of living. By reconfiguring the dominant understandings of bodies, objects, organs, hardware, and networks into relations, there lies the potential to create something different.
3.23.16 I learned that through my early work in graduate school that included millions of small marks, that I sought an experience wherein one part of my body could join in tangible relationship with another human with a different view of the world, that in the choreography of hands we could create a third network of electrical impulses. These marks, the energy for the tectonic shifts of awareness that surfaced, allowed me to claim my place in the extended senses of the mundane everyday.
I now see that what formerly felt like the straightjacket of thousands of years of language, where I did not see my experience proscribed, is precisely the system I must rewrite in an effort to cast a long cool shadow for my daughters and her daughters. I recognize that pushing against the edifice of languages not originally meant for me, not written to include my body, is exactly the friction that elides.
Aesthesia.
Cyborg.
Matr.
This is a threshold — a liminal space that occupies neither what was before nor claims to know what lies ahead, envisioning instead a future aesthesia from a past of blindness.
From the voids of myopia, detached retinas, depression, anxiety, cataracts, and presbyopia, I seek to understand the world at the surface of my body, and in doing so, touch the proximate.
CYBORG
20/25 120/70 180 Cyborgism is not about becoming machine or becoming less human; it is about awakening existing senses, intuitions, and conjunctive experiences with plant, mineral, animal, and the unseen.
The Cyborg position investigates the ways humans live amidst the cuts, ruptures, and pain of occupied pasts, present darknesses, and uncertain futures, simultaneously expanding the biologic senses within our own lifetimes.
« TRANSCENDENCE IS ALWAYS L LWAYS A PRODUCT OF IMMANENCE. »
—Gilles Deleuze
12.20.15 My mother recalls that during her labor I turned in utero with such force that I gave myself a black eye — that I used my mother’s bones to press my eye shut and simultaneously shut out the newly born world does not surprise me.
Left eye swollen shut, mouth ready, fingers curled to palm, ears muffled, and the scent of the future in the swelling darkness.
My body is a site of trauma and foreign material made now of machined polymers and substances refined from fossil fuels extracted from the earth as much as human flesh. Fabricated materials helped reclaim my eyesight. I wouldn’t be here without the forces of technology upon my body. I wonder all the time what potential lies on the frontier of the body as cybernetic machine.
Even though I could see, I now think that I was metaphorically blind for most of my life. Before any of the blindness, my clinical myopia brought near constant fear and dislocation with the world around me. I couldn’t see past my fingertips and was in many ways reliant on other objects and people for experiences: glasses, doctors, contact lenses, solutions, and other aids. These things have always been packed along in anxious triplicate on camping trips and sporting events, to school and work and to the movies.
This necessity challenged my confidence because I was beholden to devices and layers between me and my experiences of the world.
I lived through a translucent mediation: present but proximal to the sighted world and considered weak and pitied by peers and adults. I was so young that I stopped imagining a future with any vision at all because, naturally, at some point and on the trajectory of my eye time, I would be blind.
After my first eye surgery, I was sent back to my childhood home for three months of recuperation in blindness. Over the weeks, with my sight slowly returning, I continued to keep my eyes shut and learn new languages. These new languages did not include the roman alphabet or sight, instead my new languages were to become listening and sensing.
The Cyborg Matr began to see with more than the eyes.
Small vessels rupture under the surface of the skin and blood spreads as it escapes from trauma moving between fat and follicle in expanding greys, compounding mold, deep seas, asphalt, mustard, and anarchy. Colors vacate the site of compounding trauma in a changing spectral spoil. I was born bruised in an attempt to avoid the trauma of being: to witness our world, to see struggles, to feel pain, to taste truth, to hear wails, to smell decay. In avoidance, I traumatized myself and began a long dance with vision and wellness.
20/866 61/41 8.11 Encoded in the blood that spread beneath the just-born skin of my swollen left eye, a blood disorder bequeathed me by a biological grandfather. He was an abandoning man I would never know, much like the microscopic abnormal hemoglobin in my blood, a man that would leave his legacy of permanently anemic mothers in my line, taking with him as he left our iron rich blood and a grandmother’s patience and faith in others.
Thallesemia Minor one can live with; Thallesemia Major one can die from. There is some grey space in this binary though, some wiggle room for living alongside a diagnosis. Someone like me can’t mate with a Thallesemic: the combined biology would result in tragedy. Being in proximal conversation with immanent sexual [reproductive] tragedy stokes a combustion that has no outlet in a medical science that primarily concerns itself with biology and managing side effects from medications. I will spend the rest of my life explaining my blood condition.
My medical history is long and layered like an Icelandic Saga replete with pain, terror, luminous vision, and loss. I placate the doctors with my knowledge and heal myself with words.
I don’t fit on any charts.
8.4.14 As the cursor blinks I sit and I look with my eyes, my attention is forward, linear, inside-to-out, outside-to-in. But when I close my eyes I am immediately calibrated to dimension, depth, recall, sovereign experience, litany of memory, archaic smile, swaths of light and magic. It is there I touch what I am always ready for: being trained since birth as I fought my way back into the darkness of the womb. Not willing to leave the void of my mother’s belly. We have never lived without awareness of our own death. From void to void via the ovoid of the birth canal, slit like the lamps of the eyes, the parting of the lips, the waking of feeling.
Here is a snapshot of a new kind of organization: the self as a conversation with environment, its operating systems reliant on more than a human body. An understanding that leaves as it begins. One that changes as it starts, one that unfixed, in-transit and decentralized, starts to understand what humans may be and what we might become based on assembled relationships.
Every now and then I revisit the long list of afflictions as a way of re-understanding why I have this vision. My body, born bruised, has ruptured, gone blind, strangled itself, created, made new land, gone blind again, and is sighted. The inside back of my eye reconstructed: frozen, scarred, stitched, vitreous gels siphoned, forged of force and pressure, corneas cut, biological lenses emulsified, sucked out, ante-void replaced by intra-ocular lenses made of plastic. A plastic lives inside of me like the remnant of capsules, like the carcasses of mites, like the ghosts of gloved hands, like the destiny of dinosaurs, the gaze of surgeons, and the birth of the little deaths that living brings.
I live the death of control and the birth of a positional anarchy towards cultural and societal ideas of wellness — contemporary society intimates that wholeness equals wellness.
I, the cut, the altered, the part-other, the occupied.
I am living proof that one does not need to be whole in order to be well.
One lens adjusted towards distant vision, one lens adjusted to near vision, I see the future while I focus on the present and that other extension of my eyes — the brain — collects and archives the past.
I am vision without reliable sight.
Reconstructed, I am tuned to past, present, and future. I am Cyborg.
“Contemporary science fiction is full of cyborgs — creatures simultaneously animal and machine, who populate worlds ambiguously natural and crafted. Modern medicine is also full of cyborgs, of couplings between organism and machine, each conceived as coded devices, in an intimacy and with a power that was not generated in the history of sexuality.” —Donna Haraway
3.8.16 I recently saw my surgeon for my annual eye appointment. An extraordinarily kind man who is always running late, he gives his time away in swaths of gentle reassurance to his nervous and often-elderly patients. He offers his expertise in lengthy descriptions that deconstruct complicated procedures, infusing each visit with genuine and kind patience. I have seen him near-annually for thirty years — more than half my lifetime — likely a little less than half of his. A few of his assistants have been in his practice for nearly as long, familiar faces I have seen, or not seen, in various states of blurred periphery.
The appointment begins with quick vision tests, and as this is only my second time visiting as the Cyborg Matr [b. 2013], I quickly learn that at 20/25, they know.
I am the Cyborg Matr.
“From another perspective, a cyborg world might be about lived social and bodily realities in which people are not afraid of their joint kinship with animals and machines, not afraid of permanently partial identities and contradictory standpoints. The political struggle is to see from both perspectives at once because each reveals both dominations and possibilities unimaginable from the other vantage point. Single vision produces worse illusions than double vision or many-headed monsters.� —Donna Haraway
My newly constructed sight remains astigmatic, still myopic, still presbyopic; I had to get used to the light, not the onset of darkness. I get older and my outlook is brighter. I get older and there is less dark between me and the world.
We know that light refracts into colored wavelengths in a thin slice of spectrum visible to the human eye. In terms of the waves perceivable by all the senses, humans see, hear, and generally sense in a very limited slice of the perceivable. I wonder what colors look like to a mantis shrimp, or a tetrachromat human, how dolphins hear through their bones, how dogs respond to ultrasounds and detect things like quakes or cancer, and how whales navigate through sound waves that travel across entire oceans. We are perhaps necessarily limited as humans as external technologies like smartphones pull us farther away from our intuitive receptor bodies.
I close my eyes and broaden in the blackness. I wonder about enhancing the technology that IS the human body to extend the perception of the senses — not to be less human — but to remember through augmentation and expansion of existing sensual perceptions that we are already inherently mimetic of nature. I welcome the Cyborg Matr [b. 2013] because she makes me more human.
The experts can tell I am not part of the charted biological mass. Screens flash and medical assistants shift uncomfortably in their seats: I have alerted their charts and statistics. I have to remind them I am other. Explaining again the long history of: then, now, and how my health stretches into a future. No one wants to give me bad news but I explain I am the backwards patient — I defy statistics. I have started new charts and I dream of the day my skin will glow with my health her-story.
A skin made of animated GIFs that tell the future history of humanity.
A GIF is understood as an internet meme and memes play an important role in protest and self-politicization. Memes have the potential to become revolutionary simply because of their ability to reference commonly held worlds with an element of striking newness. GIFS are the embodiment of shared ideas in a community. They are the political posters of today. [Metahaven]
5.30.16 meadling vowels probes the cyborg austere to the beckoning city horizon the senses retorts as the curious soul retires to the alcove of despair bricked walls and sofa lounging dedicated to ruminating rainbows and future gallivanting sensorium authority to lead by example may be the only possible way of street throngers evolving to homo sapien ressolvement —author unknown, 2016
5.15.16 Cyborg Artist Neil Harbisson was born color-blind. Diagnosed at age eleven with achromatopsia, Harbisson sees only greyscale through his biologic eyes. During college he studied music composition at Darlington College of the Arts and had the occasion to hear a lecture by the Cybernetics expert Adam Montandan. Montanan, along with Harbisson, would eventually create the world’s first ‘eyeborg,’ a device implanted in Harbisson’s head that lets him hear light waves through proximal bone conduction.
Harbisson describes that when his eyeborg was first implanted he experienced weeks of headaches and confusion at the near constant colors-as-sounds he was experiencing. He notes that the moment his brain began to help him process the sound as information experiences was the moment that marked his actual transition to Cyborg.
“Cyborgism is an artistic and social movement that aims to create artworks through new senses or the extension, reduction or modification of an existing sense as a result of the union of cybernetics and the body.” –Neil Harbisson
“Art also lies in the creation of our own senses.” –Neil Harbisson and Moon Ribas
Harbisson resists the notion that he has a disability for favor of an opinion that he has extended senses. Both he and Ribas believe that all humans are disabled when we compare our sense abilities to other animal species. By investigating what it means to be Cyborg, we are extending our perceptions beyond our limited capabilities. Ribas and Harbisson also see Cyborgian thinking as a form of evolution to an as yet untapped potential that lies around us, one that seeks a deeper more complex understanding of this time on this planet.
Cyborgism is not about becoming machine or becoming less human; it is about awakening senses, intuitions, and conjunctive experiences with plant, animal, and nature — becoming the evolution within our own lifetimes.
My current practice of making and research values the connection of things and the im/materiality of the web, moving images, and sound as a precise space for the practice of an affective form of connection.
I contend that the investigation of the machine/object in the body in the context of this work aids in the sensual development of being.
Humans are the technology, and our awareness of this position is the evolutionary acceleration that can be taken in our lifetimes.
« THE SUNSETS NEVER LOOK SO STUNNING AS WHEN YOU SEE THEM THROUGH THE HAZE OF FACTORY SMOKE AND SOOT. »
—Michael Taussig
APPLICATION IMAGES [this page] Top row: ‘Closeted’ Series, 24 x 36 inches, conte and sticker on paper. Middle section: ‘A.M.O.G.B.H.E.M.H.’, ‘couRAGE’, ‘LO$$’, and ‘squirrel or valium.’, 24 x 36 inches, pen on paper. Bottom row: ‘Support our Fears’ campaign, magnets, t-shirts and transfer paper. [facing page] Top two rows: ‘Ecotone’ Series, 12 x 12 inches, encaustic on board. Third row left: ‘A.L.M.’, 12 x 12 inches, encaustic on board. Third row center: ‘W.K.M.’, 12 x 12 inches, encaustic on board. Third row right: ‘8’, 24 x 36 inches, ink on paper. Fourth row left and center: installation images during first residency.
SEMESTER ONE with Faith Wilding [this page] Top row: stills from stop motion animation, ‘Schlain’. Second row, left column: ‘80-foot-scroll’, documentation and installation views, 12 x 80 feet, ink on paper. Second row, right column: stills from documentation video of ‘13s’ and ‘80-foot-scroll’. [facing page] a selection of ‘13s’ and an installation view. All drawings 13 x 13 inches, ink on paper.
SEMESTER TWO with Elizabeth Duffy [both pages] Screen shots from various video sketches. Single channel screen-based digital video, standard sizes.
SEMESTER THREE with Cauleen Smith [this page] Screen shots from various videos. Single channel screen-based digital video, standard sizes. [facing page] Left row: ‘Chakra Column’, single-channel performance projection, standard size. Middle column: ‘Chakra Tabloid’ Performance, Vermont College of Fine Arts, Alumni Hall, performed with Veronica Cross, cotton work suits, head phones, audio track, handheld pico projector, and publication score. Right column: Digital documentation of ‘Chakra Score’, 16-pages, 11 x 17 inches, in a digitally printed newsprint paper edition of 100.
Colorphon Volume One Nikki Juen ÂŽ 2016 Edition ___ of 100 Date: Signature: In 2014 the Lost Mother Scrolls of Kasmir were translated by Sanskrit Scholar Christopher Tompkins This discovery re-located a lost color language related to sonic practices What follows is a new CHAKRA language
SEMESTER FOUR with Patty Chang [both pages] ‘The Cyborg Matr’, multi-channel video installation, 2016.
Artist_Statement[s] 6.4.2016 How does the porous human body know the world before the brain describes an experience? My work investigates this pre-cognitive relationship through the use of gestures and codes that employ feeling to reconstitute experiences of being alive. I use the physical body as the first probe in this investigation taking up conversation at the very edges of the sensate realm.
As a poli-disciplinary practitioner, I explore the actions of making art, design thinking, and education as agency in a search to represent the ways humans share a collective social body. Through gestures of receiving and giving, I seek participatory engagement as an aesthetic form that considers the viewers implication in layers of public feelings.
With a focus on the body as media as well as the contemplative mind in higher education, my work attempts to understand how the body is media for light and dark and how to make this understanding functional. In other words, how can we understand the experiences of a porous social body as an opportunity to live well. And since we don’t all live well, or have experiences in wellness, can healing occur in situations and places that do nothing to support the wholeness of individual human experience?
11.15.2015 I consider art, design, and education as mediums.
12.11.2015 Can a deplorable experience also be reparative?
12.24.2015 “Seeing is more than a physiological phenomenon…We see not only with our eyes but with all that we are and all that our culture is. The artist is a professional see-er.” —Dorothea Lange
8.7.2015 The constructed world is felt both inside and outside the economy of corporeal space. The origin of these feelings is an arranged dispersal through the myths of media, commerce, and technology. These dispersals as ruptures highlight yearnings for connection and community. How does an individual grasp the understanding that we can also be a singularity in a perceived chaotic whole?
3.17.2015 “Liberating education consists of acts of cognition, not transferals of information.� —Paulo Freire
5.2.2014 Can words and language direct us towards an adjacent possible? individual and singularity corporeal space proximity relationship performance affect trace / sign / absence mothering
4.28.2014 The New Materialists [Katherine Hayles] are at long last pulling the great shared thoughts past the historic binary structures of human-centric materialism. With no fixed definition of what constitutes nature or life, the New Materialists thinkers, like many theoretical physicists, prize relationships and pattern over matter and the particulate.
BIBLIOGRAPHY SEMESTER ONE Bourriaud, Nicholas. Relational Aesthetics. Trans. Simon Pleasance, Fronza Woods, and Mathieu Copeland. Paris: Leses Du Réel, 2002. Collection Documents Sur L’art. PDF. Brett, Guy. “Lygia Clark: In Search of the Body.” Art in America (Westport, Connecticut), vol 82, no. 7 (July 1994): 56-63, 108. Byrne, Michael. “Even Before Its Very First Lifeforms, Earth Might Not Have Been So Dead.” Motherboard. VICE Media LLC, 26 Apr. 2014. Web. 04 Dec. 2014. Feynman, Richard, Dr. “The Character of Physical Law.” Lectures at Cornell. New York, Ithaca. Nov. 2014. Lecture. Martin, Calvin Luther. The Way of the Human Being. Yale University Press, 1999. Print. Rolnik, Suely. “Molding a Contemporary Soul: The Empty-Full of Lygia Clark.” The Experimental Exercise of Freedom. Ed. Rina Carvajal, Alma Ruiz, and Susan Martin. Los Angeles: Museum of Contemporary Art, 1999. pages 59-108. Print. Rolnik, Suely, and Lars Bang Larsen. “On Lygia Clark’s Structuring the Self.” Afterall Journal. Central Saint Martins, May-June 2007. Web. Dec. 2014. Solnit, Rebecca. Men Explain Things to Me. Chicago, Illinois: Haymarket Books, 2014. Print. Woolf, Virginia. On Being Ill. Ashfield, MA: Paris, 2002. Print. Abram, David. “The Spell of the Sensuous: Perception and Language in a More-than-human World.” New York, NY: Vintage, n.d. Print.
BIBLIOGRAPHY SEMESTER TWO Bennett, Jane. “A Vitalist Stopover on the Way to a New Materialism.” New Materialisms: Ontology, Agency, and Politics. Ed. Diana H. Coole and Samantha Frost. Durham NC: Duke UP, 2010. 47-69. Print. Berlant, Lauren Gail. “Intimacy, Publicity and Femininity.” Introduction. The Female Complaint: The Unfinished Business of Sentimentality in American Culture. Durham, NC: Duke UP, 2008. 107-232. Print. Casselman, Anne. “Strange but True: The Largest Organism on Earth Is a Fungus.” Scientific American Global RSS. Scientific American, 04 Oct. 2007. Web. 02 June 2015. Coole, Diana H., and Samantha Frost. “Introducing the New Materialisms.” New Materialisms: Ontology, Agency, and Politics. Durham, NC: Duke UP, 2010. 1-43. Print. Coole, Diana H. “The Inertia of Matter and the Generativity of Flesh.” New Materialisms: Ontology, Agency, and Politics. Ed. Samantha Frost. Durham, NC: Duke UP, 2010. 92-115. Print. Cixous, Hélène, and Catherine Clément. The Newly Born Woman. Minneapolis: University of Minnesota, 1986. Print. Glissant, Édouard, and Betsy Wing. “Dictate, Decree.” Poetics of Relation. Ann Arbor: University of Michigan, 1997. 91-127. Print. Hayles, Katherine. “How We Became Posthuman: Virtual Bodies in Cybernetics, Literature, and Informatics.” Chicago, Ill.: U of Chicago, 1999. Print. Puar, Jasbir K. “I Would Rather Be a Cyborg than a Goddess”: Becoming-Intersectional in Assemblage Theory. Project MUSE – I Would Rather Be a Cyborg than a Goddess: Becoming-Intersectional in Assemblage Theory. Rutgers University, n.d. Web. 02 July 2015. Solnit, Rebecca. “The Faraway Nearby”. NY, NY: Penguin, 2014. Print.
BIBLIOGRAPHY SEMESTER THREE Awake, The Life of Yogananda. Dir. Paola Di Florio and Lisa Leeman. Prod. Peter Rader. Counterpoint Films, 2014. Netflix. Cvetkovich, Ann. Depression: A Public Feeling. Durham, NC: Duke UP, 2012. Print. Elkins, James. “Some Words to Describe Spiritual Art.” On the Strange Place of Religion in Contemporary Art. New York: Routledge, 2004. 105-13. Print. Iwamura, Jane Naomi. “Hyperreal Samadhi, Maharishi Mahesh Yogi.” Virtual Orientalism: Asian Religions and American Popular Culture. New York: Oxford UP, 2011. N. pag. Print. Judith, Anodea. Wheels of Life: A User’s Guide to the Chakra System. St. Paul, MN: Llewellyn Publications, 1999. Print. Thompkins, Christopher. Chakras of the Universal Mother Course. Vimeo. N.p., 15 June 2014. Web. 09 Dec. 2015. https://vimeo.com/album/2916866. Woolf, Virginia. A Room of One’s Own. San Diego: Harcourt Brace Jovanovich, 1989. Print.
BIBLIOGRAPHY SEMESTER FOUR “A Cyborg Manifesto: Science, Technology and Socialist-feminism in the Late Twentieth Century.” The Cybercultures Reader. Ed. David Bell and Barbara M. Kennedy. London and New York: Routledge, 2000. 291-324. Print. Bruno, Giuliana. “Surfaces of Light.” Surface: Matters of Aesthetics, Materiality, and Media. Chicago: U of Chicago, 2014. 55-73. Print. Cixous, Hélène, and Jacques Derrida. Veils. Trans. Geoffrey Bennington. Stanford, CA: Stanford UP, 2001. Print. Critical Art Ensemble. Flesh Machine: Cyborgs, Designer Babies, and New Eugenic Consciousness. Brooklyn, NY: Autonomedia, 1998. Print.
Derrida, Jacques. Memoirs of the Blind: The Self-portrait and Other Ruins. Chicago: U of Chicago, 1993. Print. Gidal, Peter. Structural Film Anthology. London: British Film Institute, 1976. Print. Gubbay-Blanga, Daniel, and Lars Kwakkenbos, eds. The Time We Share: Reflecting on and through Performing Arts: One Introduction, Three Acts and Two Intermezzos. New Haven: Yale UP, 2015. Print. Harbisson, Neil. Cyborg Foundation. 2013. MS. Barcelona. Jarman, Derek. Chroma: A Book of Color. Woodstock, NY: Overlook, 1995. Print. Jay, Martin. “Scopic Regimes of Modernity.” Vision and Visuality. Ed. Hal Foster. Seattle: Bay, 1988. 3-23. Print. Kruk, Vinca, and Daniel Van Der Velden. Can Jokes Bring down Governments?: Memes, Design and Politics. Metahaven: Strelka, 2013. Print. Marks, Laura U. The Skin of the Film: Intercultural Cinema, Embodiment, and the Senses. Durham: Duke UP, 2000. 138-69. Print. Morse, Margaret. Virtualities: Television, Media Art, and Cyberculture. Bloomington: Indiana UP, 1998. Print. Nelson, Maggie. Jane: A Murder. Brooklyn, NY: Soft Skull, 2005. Print. O’Malley, Susan. Advice from My 80-Year-Old Self: Real Words of Wisdom from People Ages 7 to 88. San Francisco: Chronicle, 2016. Print. Smith, S. M. “Afterimages: White Womanhood, Lynching, and the War in Iraq.” Nka Journal of Contemporary African Art 2006.20 (2006): 72-85. Web. Taussig, Michael T. What Color Is the Sacred? Chicago: U of Chicago, 2009. Print. Wark, Jayne. “Stories to Tell: Autobiography and Narrative.” Radical Gestures: Feminism and Performance Art in North America. Montreal: McGill-Queen’s UP, 2006. 86-123. Print.
COLOPHON Typeset in STAMEN font family designed by Ian Lynam.
“Stamen is the answer to a big question: What would happen if one
tried to create a typeface that was ‘out of time’? If a type designer
was to turn off the internet and put away the type specimens and
just try to explore limbic, phantom history, what might that look like?”
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