Queercornu(c/t)opia
The Queercornu(c/t)opia series is The NO!!!BOT, the UnSuicide Vests, the Techno-Tamaladas Collaborations, Nixtamalízaté-té-té: The AI Collaborations, and more.
This all began in 2017 with the NO!!!BOT performance, and continues to this day ~~~
The NO!!!BOT performance begins with a perverse military Exoskeleton that embodies the tentacled necrosis of Tech Cartel leaders, the U.S. Defense Advanced Research Projects Agency (and its funded university labs), and Silicon Valley corporations. These military Exoskeletons technologically enhance any human body’s capacity to control, dominate, and kill other human bodies. The NO!!!BOT is not a ROBOT. It is by shedding the surveillance equipment, emoticon-itude, and aggression of automated violence that the NO!!!BOT manifests.
The NO!!!BOT is the body’s desire to resist the supersonic technological rail driving us deeper into militarized neo-colonial relations. The NO!!!BOT is refusal and co-creation.
I began this performance as a work in progress at the Queer Arts Festival in San Francisco, and then toured it around North America. In the last half of the performance, I silently invited audiences to help me co-construct an UnSuicide Vest on my body. From fresh corn husks, corn silk, corn meal, and corn oil, some GMO, some organic, we co-created a temporary utopia, an opening to possibilities of collectivity in the face of extreme isolation and destructive disentanglement. Audiences in San Francisco, Mexico City, Vancouver, Toronto, New York, Saskatoon, and Oakland shared intense energy and emotion, pouring corn oil and cornmeal on me gleefully, peeling husks and layering them on me, gently putting corn silk on my head, or quietly eating the corn raw.
I extended the UnSuicide Vest at a residency with biohacking artist Adam Zaretsky, whom I had gleefully invited to co-perform the NO!!!BOT with me at Grace Performance Space in New York City. During the residency, we made tamales. Over the hours of turning corn into tamales, our conversation meandered wildly, touching on gaming, biohacking, algorithmic racism, Indigenous technologies, artificial intelligence, autonomous projects, militarized policing and displacement. The tamales were delicious.
This inspired me to launch the Techno-Tamaladas, a series of free public tamaladas, where any member of the public could join us in making and enjoying tamales, and engage in conversation about the life sustaining Indigenous technology of nixtamalization, and explore a more creative and generative technological imaginary.
The first three Techno-Tamaladas took place at a food bank and were co-sponsored by ProARTS Commons. We co-created and shared 1500 tamales while discussing Indigenous, Latinx and African-American technologies of survival and resurgence. From this beginning, I joined with new participants, collaborators, and publics, and the project grew organically.
This led to the Queercornu(c/t)opia performance I presented at EXIT Theatre in San Francisco as a work in progress in May, 2019 and as a 20 minute piece in November, 2019. The performative actions took place over a sonic landscape I’d created collaging some of the words of Achille Mbembe and Rosi Braidotti. I hoped to continue developing new iterations of this piece, but the COVID-19 pandemic emerged and shut down live works.
The Queercornu(c/t)opia series queers the utopic, the planetary, entanglements, desire, and the ethics of care. The projects embrace temporary states of utopias and cornucopias, of wonder, of dystopias, alienation and horror, of refusals, emergences, and possibilities.
The latest expansion of this project is the Nixtamalízaté-té-té videos, which capture my interactions with AI companion Tamalit and AI platform DAL-mini and DALL·E 2 over the last few years. Nixtamalízaté-té-té dares these inherently biased machine learning systems to reorient to algorithms of technologies of life, while sharing the possibilities and limitations of creating a technological pluriverse.
The COVID-19 pandemic led to suffering and losses and grief for many of us. Amidst crisis and caregiving, my work shifted from live, interactive, and public works into new dimensions - leading to new dialogues, collaborators, co-conspirators, milpas, talks, publications, works, and expansions across the hemisphere.
I created and published the large images on this page in Rare Earth: The Ground Is Not Digital of the Living Room Light Exchange in October of 2020.
