Contestable Chimeras: Excess, Indifference, and Obsolescence

Abstract: This collection of connected statements is generated primarily from the artist’s projects and performances presented at the 101.All in One Festival of Technological Art, sponsored by the Art & Science Centre at ITMO University, St. Petersburg, in 2020. They interrogate issues of embodiment, agency, and individuality in an age of excess and indifference. These performances explore designing alternative anatomical architectures, reimagining and reconfiguring the body augmented, amplified, and extended with instruments, machines, and computational systems. They are merely aesthetic gestures rather than pseudo-scientific pursuits that might serve some medical or utilitarian outcomes. They are more about generating affect rather than accumulating information. They are not about human prowess but rather exposing the body’s psychological and physical parameters. Having realized the body’s profound biological inadequacies, there is a desire to attach and insert technology into the body. Technology is no longer merely a container of the body but now becomes a component. These projects and performances problematize what a body is, how it performs, and what it means to be human. The human is an unstable construct that historically is always becoming something other, both in form and function, with its mechanical augmentation, sensory extensions, and computational amplification. What it means to be human is perhaps not to remain human at all – neither in a physical form nor in a phantom apparition.