Dear All,
As many are sheltering at home, I’d like to share a project that has been
moved to an online gallery at the New Media Artspace at Baruch College in
NYC curated by artist and professor Katherine Behar. This is a new project
that is ongoing and will take many forms in subsequent exhibitions.
Video link here:
http://www.newmediartspace.info/exhibitions/2020_stephanie_rothenberg_aphrodisiac_in_the_machine/index.php
Best wishes to all during this difficult time.
Stephanie
Curators Statement:
The New Media Artspace presents Stephanie Rothenberg: Aphrodisiac in the
Machine, a solo exhibition featuring a new four-channel video installation
by the Buffalo-based new media artist Stephanie Rothenberg. The project was
originally designed to span the four floors of the New Media Artspace
gallery. We have translated it into an online format that preserves the
four sections of the physical installation.
Aphrodisiac in the Machine presents a sci-fi narrative that explores the
ethics and economics of bioengineering nonhuman life for human survival.
Merging fact and fiction, the project plays on the libidinous myth of the
oyster, a hermaphroditic organism being bioengineered in a futuristic
aquaculture farm.
Shedding light on some of the extreme practices' humans are turning to in
an era of resource scarcity, Aphrodisiac in the Machine is framed by the
reality of climate change on the one hand, and extractivist imaginaries on
the other. As throughout her practice, Rothenberg draws out the underlying
absurdity she finds in current events. In this project, she raises
important questions about the ethics of bioremediation and the
technological design of living organisms, asking what these practices might
look like and what they may mean.
Bioremediation reconfigures the relationships between humans and the
environments they perceive as “natural”—which too often simply means
available to extraction. So in turn, the desensitization wrought by
technological immersion is what makes these practices seem “natural” or
normative. For Rothenberg, the oyster could be the answer, but not in the
form of “oyster-tecture,” like the (not science fictional) oyster reef
proposal for Brooklyn’s New York Harbor.
Instead, Rothenberg imagines an alternative: that the oyster’s aphrodisia
could provide an awakened state of enhanced sentience, going beyond mere
sexual connotations. Perhaps, this work suggests, the humble oyster could
awaken humans from their technological stupor and teach them to proactively
disrupt the desensitizing effects of media machines.
--
Stephanie Rothenberg
Associate Professor | Department of Art | University at Buffalo SUNY
www.stephanierothenberg.com
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