Slip in French
This is an example of a slip. In the encounter between the AI and my body. Image generated after several attempts: - Hey ChatGPT, can you make an ASCII poster to illustrate this text? - We’re so sorry, but the image we created may violate our content policies. If you think we got it wrong, please retry or edit your prompt.
A slip in French refers to briefs.
By using the word slip, I procedurally build an invisible 3D texture within a node-based network. Slip in French is one node. To what is it connected, and through what operation? This texture is uneven, physical, tied to the body, to mine, in surgical transformation.
How to graft procedural and physical processes until they almost align?
My research asks whether computer art can operate without reinforcing the structures it critiques. I am both the rat and the scientist. When I make prosthesis of crochet and glittery briefs, do I reinforce the ideology of technological enhancement? This is not a hi-tech innovation. If I do not build exoskeletons for soldiers and drones for home delivery, then who does? And for whom?
These notes are incomplete, written for myself, slowly accumulating over time. In the style of Andrew Matushak. But mine are in transition.
Frieder Nake said in the seventies there should be no computer art. Jacques Ellul rejects technology, describing technique as the totality of methods rationally arrived at, and having absolute efficiency (for a given stage of development) in every field of human activity.
When I engage with AI and computational systems, something is lost. That is how abstraction works. How does abstraction produce legibility, and what does it exclude? How to build an experience that lets a body feel the knowledge lived through it?
The highest levels of abstraction, things like mathematics, computing, logic, etc. — all of this can be engaged with — not just through purely cerebral algebraic symbolic methods, but by literally, physically playing with ideas. Margaret Wertheim
As a trans person, I have experienced how systems (administrative, medical, social) fail to account for lived complexity. Trans experience, for me, is not context but method.
In three days I undergo top surgery. I’m terrified. There is no abstraction here. No data to extract. Only flesh, blood, drains, and wound liquid.
Performance's objects and zine excerpt, 2015 and 2019.