Artist’s statement
The main issue since I started to research the idea of the project was to find new forms/ways in those societies clearly hostile towards anything they cannot pigeonhole as being “correct”, the construction of a real or mental image where one can find their own projection with an acceptable level of freedom becomes an indispensable goal. Each of us builds our own personal utopia wherever we are able. Like an artist I feel that I need to produce a (re) produced the types of imageries that our society are constantly try to hide.
There’s a exploration of cyber feminism in the project mixing aspect like the representation in the science and technology of the women, how the internet and other new medias still reproducing the same role of women where the only point its being prepared to seduce. Using the mimicry and performance repeating as a critic situation all those representation issues around the female imaginary.
The universe in which the figure of my work moves is a universe populated with body that it’s not belonged to his/herself. Lived by strange presences being the glance of the spectators, although maintaining a distant attitude and in certain hieratic way. Composing a monstrous parade in which the other, the other people's thing, the different thing, those that throughout the history lacked, or we would perhaps have to say that society lacked (appealed here to the identification mechanisms to which these images interpellate) the right to the word and to narrate itself in first person, are transformed into subjects that speak to us directly to the eyes. But this transformation of involuntarily passive subject in subject assets already arises marked by a difference constructed in a culture that did not allow a true existence us. Can the human beings resign to construct and to dominate, to model to the others? If those differences that said to us essential have been more than culturally conformed differences... where the power of the culture to construct new bodies finishes, would not be interesting to increase until the infinite the number of variables multiplying the generic combinations and to arrive at a point in which it would make no sense to use categories like feminine and masculine because all we would be different between us? We would not like to acquire a body cyborg? As Donna Haraway already raised: "the bodies (our bodies, we our self) are maps of being able and identity and cyborgs is not an exception. A body cyborg is not innocent, was not born in a garden; it does not look for a unitary identity and, therefore, it generates antagonistic dualism endless (or until the world finishes), one takes in serious irony" (1) the images of Multi – Gender shows to us narrate the process of construction and birth of the cybernetic bodies like a process that will be slow and painful, in which many of the relations of being able established will have to be renegotiated. Like all process that implies a drastic change will be necessary to sacrifice many of our positioning in the way.
From a firm position, committed stance in questions of gender, my work emerges from an attempt to practice art by transcending / questioning the corseting categories of masculinity and femininity. Trying developed an idea that desists from reflecting a particular gender, marked by norms and conventions. Producing images with a disturbing point, double and ambiguous where the spectator/ user find very hard, defending of the ambiguity of the human condition retouching digital the bodies of the model that composed principally the piece.
The work does not limit its focus to dealing with themes revolving around gender-related codes established and accepted by society, in addition, it provides a thought - provoking defense of the individual search for self-realization. Defending the goodness of difference, in short, of individual freedom.
The artists that essentially have a linked influence in all my work are Sarah Lucas, Cindy Sherman, Helena Cabello/Ana Carceller.
Cyborg like metaphor of the impure thing, of the compound, something located between the nature and the technological device, between original and the retort, the reality and the fiction, a sex or another one.
(1) Haraway, Donna: "A Cyborg Manifesto: Science, Technology and Socialist-Feminism in the Late Twentieth Century." In: Bell, D. and B. Kennedy: The Cybercultures Reader. Routledge, London, 2000. 309 pp.
Reflection
Overall I’m pleased with the results, since I started the course and from my initial idea the project had been modified in the way to present several times but the principal idea doesn’t change at all, about questioning the around the limit vision in the society about the masculinity and feminity. I see in a coherent way the multidiscipline of the medios in the final piece, video – multimedia interaction- photography because I think function very well in the methodology and concept of the idea to represent and protect a variety of possibilities (about sex about media). At the end I think it functions pretty well, the disconcert of the ambiguity about what the audience it’s attended (publicity campaign, science research, cyborg profile) because in fact it’s a mix of all of that but at the same time doesn’t at all.
About the interaction-implication that the user / audience receive or perceived it’s very suggest how the puzzle function as a journey (may not be clear, it will, nevertheless, lead towards the discovery of new realities) to nowhere / everywhere being intimately close to the conceptual idea to the gender multiplicity. Mixing in a process with a methodology similar as a game / experience. Probably in the phase of the interaction I would like to get more interaction with user, probably in the sense to be more direct as the initial idea function (ask people to be photographed for their self in the photo booth) but I think my informatics, enginery skills are not good enough at that moment to being able to get that result.
At the same time I’m still experimenting a major variable ways about how the puzzle script can function to offer a best and big offer of variety result and journey for the user and how to get more option to get involve the audience in the experience/understanding with the piece.
Cristina Buendia
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