Can you speak to this tension, in both your own work and the wider world of technology?īOT I is a performance where I situate myself - through my desire, love and hatred, through my abjection, (ex/in)clusion, my lack and my fill - within the brutally accelerated matrix of globalized neo-liberal techno-capitalism. BOT I seems to interweave technological and personal narratives in a way that straddles these boundaries. In your artist’s statement, you touch on the tension between technology’s capacity to connect and radically disconnect its users. Pilar wanted to bring out this tension between the live and the mediatized as the constant in our mediatized screen driven present - what artist/philosopher Jeanne Randolph calls our 'state of manic distraction.'įROM INTERVIEW BY FEMINIST ART CONFERENCE ORGANIZERS FOR THE FAC BLOG: In the talk back afterwards, hosted by Maria Belen Ordonez, many audience members expressed their discomfort with their own inability to attend to the live body when a media element is present. She ended the piece with a lullaby to a broken tablet that had emerged from her body. She then gave birth to electronics stuffed into her abdomen, and later interacted with video of the monologue to split the focus of the audience between the live and the mediatized.

Pilar redesigned the piece entirely, beginning with quick remarks while stuffing electronic wires into her mouth and throat to the point of retching.

This performance of BOT I was held inside a dusty drawing studio at the Ontario College of Art and Design as part of the Feminist Art Conference. The monologue repeats the promises of techno-capitalism, of telepresence, of connection, of uploading consciousness, while problematizing normative views of the primacy of Western scientific knowledge production the conquest of the body the benefits of computing the militarization of robotics by the Defense Advanced Research Project Agency biopiracy and indigeneity the increasing trafficking of women over the internet for sexual exploitation through enforced prostitution and the proliferation of e-waste.Īn autobiographical monologue, a discursive rant, this relato of my love/hate relationship with the divisive and inclusive problematics of emerging techno-culture draws on Jackie Orr’s Panic Diaries the future cunt of the VNS Matrix Manifesto for the 21st Century the predominantly male and white conferences of the Foresight Nanotechnology Institute in Silicon Valley popular futurist and author Ray Kurzweil’s view that human uploads to advanced computing mechanisms is a “natural” evolution the Methuselarian Foundation leader Aubrey de Grey and his Longevity Escape Velocity concept wherein human aging, and concomitant death, will be escaped texts from the Defense Advanced Research Projects Agency digital divide frameworks and other sources that reference Pilar's lived and techno mediated experience.įeminist art conference, ontario college of art and design, toronto, canada, september 26, 2015 BOT I draws from these two classic texts to devise a monologue addressing contemporary alienation. In the early 1970s, Samuel Beckett presented a ranting isolated mouth in a black theatre - his piece on alienation titled Not I. In the 1950s, Isaac Asimov presented the collection I Robot examining robotic life, and introduced the “Three Laws” of robotics. BOT I draws from the past in order to contemplate the present.

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