(de)MONSTRAS: Imaginários, Corporalidades e Materialidades Anfíbias

Stemming from the term “media-bodies”  the focus lies specifically on intricate, boundary-crossing, problematic bodies, including not only those usually deemed monstrous but also prosthetic, non-normative, hybrid bodies which circulate on the boundaries and thus delineate the confines of the human. These bodies are conceptualised as fundamentally medial, being epistemologically operative in their own methodologies of embodiment and revelation, and as a category in and of its own that enables the envisioning and imagining of more and other bodies.

Along the various research lines of this project, one of the objectives is to conduct an archaeology of these media-bodies on the basis that each material studied will reveal unique articulations activated by the media-body in question: its context, language, materiality, and embodied politics.

Commencing research into the mythological figure of HARPIE, will involve exploring technoscientific bodies such as the cyborg; those emerging from the technological mediations and experiments of artistic practices; those cutting across different atmospheres and elements, like plants (and their digital transmutation); and those projected within current technical and cultural complexities—within the materials they edit and produce—all while seeking to understand the imaginaries they foster.

The ever-updating website is structured as a glossary of the terms, practices, and materialities comprised within this research.

keywords: media-bodies / practices of imaginaries / critical posthumanism / artistic mediations / embodied politics