Posthumanity: Merger and Embodiment Critical Issues Series Editors

From representation to abstraction and from the materiality of the object to the fluidity of experience, the trajectory of the artistic object from the beginning of the 20th century up until today has subjected it into a constant questioning of its material substance and an incessant expansion of its communicative means. As contemporary artists realize their work through time-specific –hence fleeting- actions, temporary installations and intangible bytes and pixels, the question of the immaterial rises as a challenging enigma that poses a new question to every answer attempt: Can we talk about immateriality and visuality within the same discourse? Can the immaterial be linked to the intellect and the corporeal at the same time? How can we experience it with the body? (Doctoral thesis in English and Spanish. See links for each language)

International Journal of Performance Arts and Digital Media, 2017

This paper explores the extension of the body through the technological architecture of interactive art installations. It incorporates and builds upon Don Ihde’s postphenomenological philosophy of technology to argue how tools extend and limit the human body. This work expands upon Ihde’s hypothesis to consider how technologically mediated bodies adapt to and co-create interactive experiences. Through a methodological framework of postphenomenology, this work uses Jeffrey Shaw’s The Legible City (1988) and Dennis Del Favero’s immersive artwork Scenario (2011) as case studies. Through application of Ihde and an interview I conducted with Del Favero in 2014, this paper examines how the body is mediated, extended and reduced into his artwork through motion sensing technology. It also considers Ihde’s concept of bodyhood as well as his specific ideas on human-technology relationships, which I argue can be broken down as a way to consider the composition of interactive art. Overall this paper considers the human body’s negotiation with technology as an interface that co-composes experientiality where users become postphenomenologically extended in interactive environments.

Our current relation to physical and social bodies betrays a deep uneasiness in our society, engendered by altered definitions of physical identity and increasing mediacentric behavior. Obsessive violence, the notion of invincibility, and recurring themes of the survival of the fittest in film and TV combine with sensationalistic news reports of genetic progress, and manipulation of human longevity, health, appearance, and reproduction to foster the concept of disposable bodies and physical reality. Cloning is an established fact; genetic engineering has become the stuff of newspaper headlines. The now-famous predictions of Guy Debord (1) in the late 1960's about a reality that would be transformed into a myriad of spectacles have proven true. The continuous and tremendous impact of broadcasting technology has contributed to re-engine our perception of physical reality as a soap opera complete with logo, specific design and commercial breaks. So, too, have communication networks turned into appendixes to our lives, as faxes, modems and e-mail increase the dissociation from experienced reality. Digital communications also promote an ideology of transcendence in regard to the plurality and diversity of cultures, politics and histories that overcome space and time, offering the promise of an open space of equal exchange based upon a non hierarchical structure. On the one hand, the creation of a global network and space subverts unilateral systems of information by de facto opening transnational/transcultural connections, while on the other hand, it allows the restructuring of geo-political boundaries into an ever-expanding market of limitless access. The latter aspect demonstrates the shift away from the dominance of national economic and cultural interests that characterized modern capitalism to a next phase, that of post-modern, transnational pancapitalism. Pancapitalism better operates under the guise of a " global " identity, for which otherness is as good as it offers new marketing concepts, distributed through the virtual corporate

Art in the Age of the Internet, 1989 to Today edited by Eva Respini, 2018

The essay critiques the term Post-internet art as capacious reference to the ways that experiential, multisensory installations treat images as inherently variable and reproducible, and—in the most benign cases—as mutable works, equally at home in the space of the museum or on a webpage. In contrast, however, this essay argues that Barry, Birnbaum, Hershman Leeson, Scher’s and other post-internet art antecedents introduced in the 1990s suggest new affinities with what can be thought of as other perceptual systems and subjectivities. In doing so, their multimodal and multiplatform artworks offer a feminist methodology for contemporary art history that contests and re-inscribes existing modernist predecessors.

Art Journal, 2020

Subjectivity, 2018

In the wake of post-structuralism and posthumanism, contemporary theory has struggled to conceptualize the subject without reproducing the human/ technology dichotomy. Building on Deleuze and Guattari's machinic ontology of desiring-production as synthesis, we develop the concept of synthetic subjectivation as an alternative. Synthetic subjectivation is a conjunctive event within a dynamic and recursive process that both results from and intervenes in a composition of material elements and embodied potentials, including organic, technical, and social elements. The subject is a subject of the composition, not of the organism or the technical machine. Deleuze and Guattari's work serves as the basis of this approach, but, drawing on the media analysis of Friedrich Kittler, we rethink the syntheses as investments in a sociotechnical field. A case study of a university makerspace illustrates the concept. At stake in makerspaces, and in any context of subjectivation, is the autopoietic capacity of the composition to pilot desire and produce active, joyful subjects.

For visual artists, the incipient elements of the posthuman identified in this article signal change in how art is produced and under whose agency, what human art means, and even what being human means—given the blurring of how we define the concept of " human " in a rapidly changing posthuman environment.

Culture & Psychology, 1998

Computers and Composition: An International Journal, 2019

We begin with a differentiation between the body and embodiment-two distinct but interwoven concepts: the body as abstraction and generality; and embodiment as particular, corporeal process and experience. The body is a marked site/cite; that is, it is written. The body is composed (and decomposing). The body is delimited, though never in a fixed or static sense despite any desire toward, as N. Katherine Hayles (1999) asserted, "an idealized form that gestures toward a Platonic reality" (p. 196). When we write of the body, however, through and with our actual bodies (embodiment), we are always already speaking of and with a composition-a mark, a text, an ever-penultimate elaboration. But we are also speaking of a decomposition. As a rhetorical event, embodiment is the process of the revision, a practice of becoming. "In contrast to the body," Hayles (1999) noted, "embodiment is contextual, enmeshed within the specifics of place, time, physiology, and culture, which together compose enactment. . . . embodiment is the specific instantiation generated from the noise of difference" (p. 196). Put differently, the body is abstract and normalized; embodiment is specific, of difference, nuanced, lived, and felt. The body is a noun (product/being); embodiment is a verb (process/becoming). The body is our name; embodiment is our breath. Embodiment, Anne Frances Wysocki (2012) claimed, "calls us to attend to what we just simply do, day to day, moving about, communicating with others, using objects that we simply use in order to make things happen" (p. 3). If material bodies constitute what we are, then embodiments constitute what material bodies do. Digital technologies have complicated and compounded the compositions and decompositions of the body and embodiment as such.