[-empyre-] More on Bio/Nano Materialisms and Anti-techno-formalism

[micha cárdenas]

Thank you Ricardo, Elle and Heather for the introductions to your work.

I'm very interested in developing this conversation more to try to
consider the intersections of queer and bio/nano/materialisms. Do you
think of your engagements with new media as queer? How so? Also, do
you think of your engagements with bio/nano technologies as a
materialist approach or something else? Could you provide some links
to media that you're described so eloquently here?

I'm interested in how materialism, in it's claims to a kind of reality
based in matter, relate to a possible techno-formalism and how your
works escape those. Pinar's work is an excellent example as well, as
it seems to be more based in fantastical imagination of possibilities
created as a simulacrum, as in her pieces SuperMammal and Neolabium:

http://pinaryoldas.info/speculativeBiologies/supermammal/
http://pinaryoldas.info/speculativeBiologies/sample-page/

...rather than in the techno-formalism often seen in bio-art where the
artist engages at the level of actual biological production. Do you
find new media discussions to often be centered around the technology
"working", in a kind of machismo where the best technology is equated
with the best art? How do you move in your own work from the actual
material or data you choose to start with and into a poetics or
embodiment in performance? How do you respond to audience's or
curator's concerns with the technical accomplishment in a work?
Perhaps this is an element of a queer approach to new media, to step
out of the logic of technical feats that serve as a spectacle to
pacify or entertain an audience and step into a space that is perhaps
more confusing, blurred, playful, fem[me/inine] (?), yet still
intentional.

gracias,

  micha

-- 
micha cárdenas
PhD Student, Media Arts and Practice, University of Southern California
Provost Fellow, University of Southern California

New Directions Scholar, USC Center for Feminist Research

MFA, Visual Arts, University of California, San Diego

Author, The Transreal: Political Aesthetics of Crossing Realities,
http://amzn.to/x8iJcY

blog: http://transreal.org