A personal investigation of the culture/zoe/technology continuum
Video Essay Dr. Pia Palme for ÖGGF Jahrestagung 2024, University of Graz
Abstract
In a critical video essay, I investigate how the formerly separated fields of technology, nature, humanity and culture blur and merge in the Anthropocene. From my position as an artist, feminist activist and scholar, I will put forward a lustful and situated exploration into the entanglements that I experience. Inspired by Val Plumwood, Donna Haraway, and Karen Barad, I propose to abandon binary thinking and examine the culture/nature/technology continuum. A focus will be on how the posthuman convergence changes my perception of myself as an ageing female* human being.
My practice regularly includes machines and technologies to extend into a more-than-human environment and culture. It is an active exchange of matter and material with the environment as my collaborator. From the intra-action, a form of care emerges—a form of passion, longing and engagement. A love-affair. With Rosi Braidotti and Baruch Spinoza, we can take an affirmative approach towards a new materiality. Life and work emerge as a reciprocal gesture of erotic commitment. However, matter and material are in a constant flux and must be shared between all forms of living/non-living entities: Something new is something lost.
What will guide my investigation is listening perception, while my experience of the damaged state of the Earth acts as a frame of reference. This experience is individual and corporal and infiltrates my thoughts, feelings and actions. The audiovisual format of my essay affords new epistemic possibilities: polyphonic strands of ideas can be interwoven. I plan to make field recordings and film outside to bring my intra-action with the wider environment into the presentation.