2 - Commentary on Fe/males: Sieges of the Post Human (Transmedia Installation)

Summary

When I was 24 years old, I logged into a computer for the first time. From that moment I knew that I would never leave it. The key idea of this project was born from a personal experience that led to the writing of a text in a process that started four years before the launch of the work. Fe/males: Sieges of the Post Human, a transmedia installation, produced and presented by the Integrated Arts Collective, CAIN, was shown for the first time in the Galpón Víctor Jara, an arts center in Santiago de Chile. It had twelve performances, each of which lasted one hour and five minutes, between January and February 2004.

This project emerged from conversations with the musician John Streeter Ralph, about the central idea of the text: the interactions between bodies and machines and how those machines fit in with our bodies in order to radically change our lives. We thought of a transmedia installation to develop this global project which would involve several disciplines in the arts. A raw exposition saturated with a new humanity, the project proposed putting texts at the service of other disciplines: performance, audiovisual images, music, sound, lighting, screens in combination with diverse technologies that would enable us to bring more enigmatic and experimental texts to the public. We invited Cecilia Godoy, an actress and ballerina; Marcelo Vega, an audiovisual creator; Antonio Zurita to be in charge of machines and technology and the rest of the equipment.

This is theater/novel. The text passes through the body of the actress, who memorizes, reformulates, and recreates it, incorporating her own knowledge and images. To the body are added words and audiovisual images which are shown continuously during the whole show, projected on to two screens facing one another on opposite sides of the stage.

The work began with a piece of choreography by the actress which took place under an enormous sheet of corrugated, transparent plastic that covers the whole stage area. Two spot lights above followed her movements at the same time as a video was projected on two screens located on opposite sides of the stage. “I hate my father. My father. Love does not exist. I hate those messages that are burned into the memory. Love no. My father no, nor my mother”; the video included images of fragments of bodies and embryos floating in water.