record – LABS

Thesis Info

URL where full thesis can be found: docs.google.com/document/d/1BZceq_sFgEkoFaJJTcf7Et-w5ukhB3R0FeEjrxYNBLo/edit?usp=sharing

Keywords: artifical life, biopolitics, post colonialism, contemporary art, new media art

Abstract: 200-500 words: The idea of shapeshifting is present in the oldest forms of totemism, shamanism and extant literature and represents our desire to create new forms. Drawing on Southwest Native American philosophy, indigenous design, and post-colonial theory, this thesis examines the signifier of the shapeshifter as a symbolic metaphor to create techno-hybrid forms. Shapeshifting reformation aims to understand and develop new visual languages through the lenses of artificial life, post-colonialism, and otherness. Analysis of emergent forms are employed through sculpture and automata, system aesthetics, and real-time systems leading to an imaginative paradigm shift in relation to forms enforced by colonial conversion. Thus, this paper will further examine the construction of social and scientific discourses about power that initially authorized colonial violence and continues to support repressive policies against indigenous species. It argues that as the previously stable ordering divisions of Life and Nonlife shake, new figures, tactics, and discourses of power can emerge through hybrids. These concepts will be discussed in selected works from 2016-18: the desert, the animist, and the virus, Reformation of 50,000 Letters, Material Reiteration, and Data Weaving as Activism using indigenous processes combined with computation to refigure and reimagine colonized objects.