Research practice

admin — Wed, 07 Mar 2012 02:37:41 +0000

My research is exploring a practice of digitally-mediated movement on, within and across the screens and surfaces of the urban ‘assemblage’ of New York City. Inspired by the ‘nomadic’ practices of de Certeau’s “walking rhetorics” and the dérive of the Situationist International, this movement will address issues of display/concealment, surface/depth, autonomy/dependency, mastery/vulnerability, activity/passivity and exteriority/interiority implicated in the masculine identifications of the digitised control society. The project will research and reflect on creative practices of annotating the surfaces and screens, and re-mapping/re-imagining the space, of the urban assemblage in order to unsettle the gender coding of these dualisms. By wandering with their masculine identifications, the project seeks to express a ‘becoming-art’ of resistance to the society of control, exploring embodiments of political subjectivity within the urban assemblage, whose virtuality invites new realities “to be born.”

Share/Bookmark

Control Societies and Nomadic Masculinities: Toward a ‘Becoming-Art’ of Resistance

admin — Tue, 12 Apr 2011 17:40:29 +0000

In an era of sentient things and technologized selves, the “society of control” described by Deleuze has become real. Grounded in the context of a ‘global’ city (New York City), my research seeks to theorize the contemporary workings of the “new forces” of the control society in terms of the gendered functioning and effects of digital technologies. I will explore the gendered operations of the digital control society in relation to a series of binary predicates through which the self is made subject to a feminine-masculine gender coding; visible/object vs invisible/subject, passive/dependent vs active/autonomous, private/inside vs public/outside. Using a range of media, my aim is to survey the digital urban environment as a series of ‘virtual enclosures’ that constitute a gendered ontology of control, but whose gender idioms become a ground on which to wander in exploring a creative practice of resistance. The task of such a practice is to expose the virtual, not as the other of the real, but as “the mode of reality implicated in the emergence of new potentials.” In doing so, I seek to test tools and processes for using different forms of digital media to forestall the “normative, regularizing, and reproductive” closures of the gendered society of control in a nomadic art of resistance that is guided by a logic, not of new ways of being, but of continual becoming.

Share/Bookmark

Alan Greig

Research practice

Control Societies and Nomadic Masculinities: Toward a ‘Becoming-Art’ of Resistance