EXHIBITION STATEMENT

Telematic Media Arts is pleased to present Interspecies, a two-artist exhibition of work by the Los Angeles – based performance artist hamsa fae and the international cyberpunk art collective Orphan Drift (Ranu Mukherjee and Maggie Roberts), interrogating self-identity and the limits of the human, by foregrounding our entanglement with what we otherwise take to be an alien other, different from us. In distinct ways, each of these artists deconstructs metaphysical binaries – between male and female, mind and body, the human and the animal, nature and technology – instead cultivating novel, fluid ways of being in-between. 

In their multi-media project, If AI were Cephalopod, 0rphan Drift speculatively imagines an AI consciousness coded with the somatic tendencies of an octopus.  What paradigm of “intelligence” are we presupposing in the development of Artificial Intelligence? Is it not perhaps better to imagine the intelligence of machines in light of the remarkably sophisticated cognition of other creatures? What alternative forms of experience and perception are revealed in so doing? And if intelligence is so conceived, is human cognition not perhaps already more of a distributed, embodied consciousness than commonly understood?

In her performance video, X-POLLINATION, hamsa fae juxtaposes the animated .gifs of two ritual, eco-performances of genital tucking, exploring embodiment, gender fluidity, digital identity, and states of being in-between. The video is retro-futurist, appealing to a lost, primordial past, while aspiring to a yet to be realized, technological future. It subverts linear time, combining cutting-edge gender-affirming science with the symbolic significance of ancestral remedies, and opening onto a mythic present outside of time, riddled by the fluid instability of not only sex and gender, but time, consciousness, embodiment, being.

In this way, both artists reach beyond the limits of the human – understood since the Rennaisance as the “measure of all things” – conjuring figures of the interspecies that not only lie between conventional oppositions, but integrate and exceed them, evoking the embodied consciousness of something post-human: a mythical creature, both monstrous and beautiful, subhuman and divine, beyond the hegemony of binary orders.

ARTIST BIOS

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