The Artifacts of No-Place

Abstract

This thesis assembles within it a glimpse of ‘a life’. It traces a path of disillusion to dissolution in navigating a search for identity in an increasingly globalized world.

Settling into the trajectory carved by posthumanism, the thesis is based in the twenty-first century as a temporal and paradigmatic tipping point. More specifically, it has allowed me to channel the embodied liminality I have felt during this time, as a woman, a digital native, and a perceived other, through a series of devices affixed within the space of the head – The Artifacts of No-Place. In disrupting identification and playing with the boundaries of the body, each artifact has lent itself to different performances, different means of liberation, concealment, and spectacle. These performances connect the thesis to a long history in cultural studies, critical theory, and feminism which interrogate the gaze in-between the subject and the other, and grounds an otherwise disembodied speculation on disillusion and dissolution within a process of making.

The following document captures a methodology of serious play undertaken in this thesis. It assembles lengthy fragments of thought that navigate struggles with otherness, home, and difference, adjacent to visual encounters, headline clippings, and embodied narratives. This is done to mirror my understanding of belonging, as it morphed to accept processes of becoming. Building off of Rosi Braidotti’s nomadic subject, Donna Haraway’s cyborg, and Gilles Deleuze and Félix Guattari nomad, I play with the boundaries imposed and propagated in society to map a meandering route towards a critical posthuman and nomadic subjectivity.

Scrolling endlessly, scaling rapidly, we dissolve and reform within global movements of information, energy, and ideas.