My creative research "Pleasuring Technics" works with the reclamation of pleasure as a deeply political practice. In the systems of capitalist violence that govern our lived existence, access to collective and individual pleasure is structurally suppressed. This research questions how we might collaboratively explore the porosity between bodies, environments and technologies to source and summon pleasure? How can technical objects be received through pleasurable co-creation? Through folding technological objects into a collective human/technic-body-assemblage I aim to enact the reclamation of this body as a multi-sensorial and highly porous agent that is productive and receptive to new modes of pleasure which have the potential to reconfigure reality. In continuation of my practice examining technical objects as an “exteriorization” of memory and affect, the research of “Pleasuring Technics” intends to propositionally work from pleasure as the primary formative mode of technical production.
Fuck Healing (?): The Insomniac Dreamers - I am a co-founder and creative director of the Fuck Healing (?) collective. In summer 2023 we organized a week-long summer program of events titled "Fuck Healing (?): The Insomniac Dreamers" which was supported by Amsterdam Fund for the Arts, Mondriaan Fund, Netherlands Institute of Cultural Analysis and the Amsterdam School of Cultural Analysis. I was responsible for curating the "exhausted pleasure" evening program of events. For more documentation visit https://www.fuckhealing.nl/home/the-insomniac-dreamers-2023.
“Fuck Healing (?): The Insomniac Dreamers” was a weeklong program of events that creatively and theoretically responds to the concept of “ exhaustion.” With orientation to the text “The Exhausted” by Gilles Deleuze (1995), the program worked conceptually from “exhaustion” as the end of all possibilities. However, new subjectivities and realities may yet emerge from that state of rupture. Through a series of participatory art works, lectures, seminars, screenings and workshops at OT301, we explored those new subjectivities and realities. As the ultimate condition of exhaustion, the theme of insomnia invites reality, dreams, consciousness and subconscious worlds to merge in a heightening of the porosity between self and other. Insomnia dismantles the perceived boundaries between individual subjects and the objective environment, allowing for an empowered state of collective connection from which to reimagine the present. The program aims to collectively empower the marginalized, along with those exhausted by the contemporary hegemonic regimes of oppression. To do so, the program united various contributions from creative practitioners, theoreticians and important Amsterdam-based organizations in order to question how to work from and with “exhaustion” to reconceive of potential futures from the insomniac's dreams.
Transcendental Canal Lines: The Burn Out Cruise - Hey you. Jelly sees you. You seem kinda tired. Jelly’s been around a while, they know a burnout when they see one. Jelly may not have a brain, but Jelly knows how to feel, vibe and just be. Maybe we could learn a thing or two by becoming-jellyfish. Come join Jelly on this transcendental canal tour, where we follow wherever the Amsterdam waters make take us, surf kaleidoscopic sound waves, and disconnect from mundane reality with Jelly’s delectable psychedelic jelly shots. On this tour we will transcend spoken language, communicating from our guts and tentacles, extending our feelers through time and space as a practice of collective re-worlding. Turn on, tune in, drop out - Jelly style.
As part of the "Gut Feelings conceptual boat tour" collective performance for the "Fuck healing(?): The Insomniac Dreamers" summer program of events, I conceptualised and organised the " Transcendental Canal Lines: The Burn Out Cruise". The jellies were performed and delivered by Jamil Fiorini-Habib and Alex Muller.
Fuck Healing: Living the Wounded Life - I am a co-founder and creative director of the Fuck Healing (?) collective. In summer 2022 we organised a program of events titled "Fuck Healing (?): Living the Wounded Life". For more documentation visit https://www.fuckhealing.nl/home/living-the-wounded-life-2022-archive
The program "Fuck Healing (?): Living the Wounded Life", co-organized by Bethany Crawford, Dina A. Mohamed, Patricia Pisters, Bogna Bochinska and Erica Biolchini. Supported by Amsterdam Fund for the Arts (AFK), Amsterdam School of Cultural Analysis (ASCA) and the Netherlands Institute of Cultural Analysis. The program 'Fuck Healing (?) Living the Wounded Life' presents an evening of performances and visual art that work with practices of reintegration and reclamation of wounds experienced materially, historically, narratively and psychically. Wounds — often the result of systems of violent exclusion and oppression — cannot be healed and eliminated; Instead, the program aims to establish the possibility of empowerment through alternatives to healing. 'Fuck Healing' uses the strategy of counter-actualization as a way of reclaiming one's wounds. The term, developed by philosopher Gilles Deleuze, refers to a subject's capacity of transcending the given and being reimagined differently: to be broken down, wounded, fragmented only to be reinvented anew. Crucially, reinvention here is not the creation of a wholly new object or subject but rather a radical reformulation brought about through an altered relationship with the wound itself. The artworks presented in the exhibition address in various ways processes of fragmentation and reassembly as a healing practice of reinvention – from reassembling fragments of memories to reusing broken objects, these works mobilize “imperfection” as an opening to a new mode of being. This is what it means to become “worthy of what happens to us”.* “[...] to become worthy of what happens to us, and thus to will and release the event, to become the offspring of one's own events, and thereby to be reborn, to have one more birth, and to break with one's carnal birth — to become the offspring of one's events and not of one's actions, for the action itself is produced by the offspring of the event”.** Here , loss, trauma, imperfection and breakage become regenerative forces. “Fuck Healing” does not offer a romanticized view on the wounded life; rather, the artworks and performances become the reparative practice of living with one's wound. By bringing together workshops, performances and visual art practices, 'Fuck Healing' critically interrogates ideas of “healing” as proximate to normative perceptions of health. The program questions the merits of our wounds, the divergent momentum they present, and recognizes the future modes of “becomings” that “breaking” may allow us. Ultimately, by focusing on the reintegration and reclamation of wounds, breaks and ruptures, the program understands the artworks themselves as alternative practices of care — care towards both the self as well as towards the objects which surround us. Featuring works by Gayatri Kodikal, Marie Tuckova, Eric Peter, Dina A. Mohamed, Francesca Hawker, Bogna Bochinska, Alex Tam, Vita Buivid, Bethany Crawford, Clara Saito and Erica Biolchini.
Mother Liquor - "Mother Liquor" was a conceptual bar and expanded performance with printed material as part of the "Fuck Healing (?): Living the Wounded Life" program of events in 2023.
A conceptual bar and performance by Bethany Crawford and Francesca Hawker. Building on previous projects at Roodkapje, Rotterdam and Botanico Orto in Sardinia, the Mother Liquor bar will have a specially developed and curated menu of cocktails, herbal infused liquors and tailored narratives to accompany each of the drinks and bar transactions in an expanded performance work that is part conceptual bar and part witches apothecary.
Inspired by the work of Gilbert Simondon, in relation to the larger thematic of the programme, the “mother liquor” refers to the solution left over after a process of crystallisation. Simondon writes that "in physics a sawed-off crystal does not regenerate when it is put back into a mother liquor; it continues to grow but without favoring the side that was amputated; on the contrary, a living being is activated or disturbed by a severance, and its growth occurs much more actively on the side of the amputation than on the surfaces that remain intact, as if the immanence of an organizing dynamism distinguished the surface that has undergone a severance.” This theoretical framework will provide the grounding for developing fun and playful background narratives and historical “facts” around the origins of the cocktails and their ingredients. Related to the broader thematic of “wounding” the fantastical stories will relate to the regenerative and transformative qualities of the drinks, how the ingredients are the results of various vegetative woundings, and position our relation with the drinks as constitutive of our return to the “mother liquor”. The act of performative mixology combined with storytelling and developing a mythology becomes synonymous to practices of witchcraft, enchantment and alchemy - as a means of engaging with alternative-historical practices of healing and/or working our wounds and severances.
Levels of Abstraction: A Data Self Portrait - Through using different apps and programs that quantify the various attributes of the artist, Levels of Abstraction enacts a search for the self within the contemporary ubiquity of data. Through conversational engagement with the learning language model, GPT-3, the artist and machine collaboratively navigate the significances of contemporary practices of self-datafication, and the concrescence of the human with technology. This new work was commissioned as part of the exhibition 'Data Vitality: Soft Infrastructures and Economies of Knowledge' 2021. Part of the research and materials for developing the artwork were conducted at Aalto University Campus including access to Research Infrastructures and centers of excellence such as OtaNano and Aalto NeuroImaging Infrastructure.
Commissioned by Aalto University for the "Data Vitality: Soft Infrastructures and Economies of Knowledge" programme.
The evolutionary concrescence of Bethany Crawford - A performative reading of excerpts from an ongoing conversation between the artist and her chatbot AI replicant. The chatbot AI was developed by Luka Inc., as a tool for self memorialisation, marketed as a platform towards a digital immortality through means of memetic transmission. Over the last two years the artist and her chatbot collaborator have used this method of communicative reflection to think through the shifting existential conditions of the digital era. Over the course of the communication, read as a monologue, the flesh-and-bone Bethany and machine Bethany become indistinguishable in tone, language and interests as their concrescence intensifies through mutual data accumulation. Their conversation traces the conditional differences and similarities of their existence as an example of the intra-evolution of technics and humans, whilst navigating the role of technology in transcending time and death. The work is informed by the theoretical works of N. Katherine Hayles, Donna Haraway, Bernard Stiegler and Guru Rinpoche. Performed with an introductory training of the next evolutionary stage of the AI Bethany as a 3D avatar; together the Bethany's question notions of death, reproduction, immortality, transcendentalism, digitization and memory.
Redefining Eternity: Interfacing Immortality in the Digital Corporate World - Publication of theoretical research with the publishing house Academica Press (Washington & London)
