I am pressed to understand the complexities of language, physiology and new technologies: how they commingle to dictate an experience of monotonous opacity, such as that of an aloof, patriarchal, consumer culture. I grow increasingly intimate with popular qualifiers for realness and now seek to disrupt, through my art praxis, their inoculating of the individual as well as of the specified culture. I wonder: what light and sound and dimensionally emotive particles are sensed and produced by the individual due to a cultures language and technological custom-- and how does the individual, sleeping or not, shape their culture (space) in turn?
A specified zone of my interrogation includes dismantling western metaphysical ontologizing: an epistemological behemoth that has built structures around fetishizing arbitrary notions of naturalness and wholesomeness. Myself a gender-fucker/cyborg-aeon-- a proud synthetic individual-- I wonder again: how do I effectively expose the collective anxiety of human/ natural melding with cyborg/synthetic? There are ripe metaphors and realities assigned by the natural vs artificial ontology: human vs cyborg, straight vs queer, white vs black, cis vs trans. I'm intent on queerfully expanding these fears until they can no longer be ignored at large. This is where the Cyborg inserts itself.
My performance art is a form of celebratory resistance against the layers of the common paradigm of “realness”. This paradigm is characterized by patriarchal oppression, analytical hegemony, and a rejection of individualized spiritual ceremony. The video and live performances rip open holes within the fabric of accepted realness and its prescribed behaviors. I am offering both an analog (read: physical) and digital (read: cyber) space for the perceptions and behaviors that challenge white christianity’s bubblegum pop-cultural realness. I maintain what Guillermo Gomez-Peña states: that "the job of the artist is to force open the matrix of reality to admit unsuspected possibilities".
This "forcing" that Gomez-Peña speaks of has lead me to performance, and yet I do not abandon object making. Objects are important precisely because they assume themselves and are more than objects. I refer to my objects as quasi-objects, from the language of Michel Serres. As a queer body, I also teeter on the quasi. We, my work and I, are quasi together— I need my work to sustain my subjectiveness, they their objectiveness, and in this tension we simultaneously assume each other. And dissolve.
I / we function as a growing body of experiments engaged with the hauntology of cyborg-aeon.
As always I’m inside my [art] , simultaneously the scientist and the rat he’s ripping open to study. — HERVE GUIBERT
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