1 (0-3) thesis/intro
I am interested in orchestrating collisions between digital and material media that demonstrate the intersections of women’s art and craft with digital media through conceptual art and theatrical installations. I have always been kind of a compulsive inter-disciplinarian. I tend to approach understanding through holding unlike pairs of concepts together and my practice, if anything, is always an effort toward some kind of understanding of community through the creation, examination, and/or reconciliation of difference and non-difference.
2 (3-6) personal history
As undergraduate, my early philosophical inquiries involved a lot of inconvenient questions regarding feminism and the history of mathematics. I became concerned with mathematics’ relationship to mapping, metaphor, and other technologies of representation; then, how such technologies are deployed in the service of being, movements of social control and social change; and what might become conceivable for more equitable human possibilities.
In other words- I was looking not just for new maps but new ways of reading maps, overcodings that permit new ways of being in the world. (pause)
My artistic efforts are part of a continuing interrogation of diaspora, materialism, mathematics, desire, and space that draws primarily upon family, history, literature, and the speculative fictions of an intensely private language becoming communicable.
3 (6-9) thesis
My EGS thesis, A Science of Spaces: Art, Empire, and Being in the Nth Dimension explores the concept of space through a collection of six geographic maps and the application of several philosophical and theoretical concepts that permit poetic practice as science. The thesis is a rethinking of maps and space within an inherently dynamic semitoic-materialism, (pause) by which I mean- the real and the imaginary imbricated or folded together as process. The title itself is a kind of tongue in cheek, an overly big title, emphasizing the high drama of over-abstraction.
My experience at EGS was one of tremendous intellectual exposure and creative expansion. I hit a kind of semantic limit as my philosophical writing became mired in continental tendencies, the internet, and digital media. My work started to spill over into animated texts and visual works of art.
I find that my work can’t help but emerge and respond to both traditional and contemporary feminist discourses around race, class, gender, nation, and technology. It’s where I am from. (pause)
It feels a bit strange to be “showing” my work for I experienced them as spontaneous digital releases, bottled messages meant to be found rather than necessarily shown. They don’t really feel like they belong to me. They are mere signs of existence, frenetic with references, composing a kind of cribbed code intended to interest and interpolate only those who are willing and able to receive and return it.
4 (9-12) examples
example one... “passwords are for sharing”
In exchange for a password into a well known archive of academic papers, I traded this homemade postcard. The images were all found online and the collage was assembled and watercolored in material space. I really cut and pasted it together but discovered that it found its true life in the return to illuminated digital re-iteration. The image is a working through of technology, U.S. history, hope, care, miscegenation, reverse-colonization, and diaspora. Song of Myself, Song of Ourselves.
example two... “text/ile”
This file erupted out of an assignment to compare and contrast the work of Walter Benjamin and Roland Barthes. It is perhaps my most compulsive project. When considering together, “The Death of the Author” and “The Storyteller” which examine the effects of technology upon authorship, words, and writing- this activity made the most sense. Both writers rely upon similar tropes and imagery around weaving, warp, and weft. The work is an exploration around the idea of digital papers, the craft of storytelling, and a twisting of the ubiquitous text based content of the internet into and away from the source of language.
5 (12-15)
With respect to my project proposal...
I’m imagining a physical and digital double installation thematically evoking Virginia Woolfe’s A Room of One’s Own. I envision a digital/Victorian scene, a “room” in which the themes of privacy, gallery, scholarship, feminine craft, time, and creative space are explored through the imbrication of home and craftwork into as well as out of digital media. I’m looking for what’s gained and lost in the translation, exploring the relation between virtual and material space, I like playing upon the etymological origins of the word digital in a way that recalls the feminine mind and body into being through the contemporary context of digital media while simultaneously recollecting the European history of women’s higher education in hand sewn fancywork like embroidery and quilting.
The End
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