Like a construction site the ghostly copy situates us in a space in progress. A ghostly copy between the real, and the imaginary, the living and the dead, the physical and the digital, the past and the future. The fabric is object, installation, space, and intimate refuge of auto-ethnography, and reflective of the possibilities of conscious memory. Fantasmita (ghostly) is an invitation to connect with unfinished grief, with the warp of memory that holds us between yesterday and tomorrow.
Remembering, mapping and imagining what was, what is, what could be.
- Fantasmita (ghostly), 2023
- w/g,g,w/o,b,w/b,o,w/b,b, 2022
- recordar lo intimo (to remember the intimate), 2020
- Urdimbre, 2023
- The Perfect Storm, 2022
- PRCSS, 2019
- Piedra Blanda / Soft Stone,
2016
Layers of care, memory, and autonomy become a new translation for remembering beyond the digital. In a process that resembles an autonomous data recovery process, a broken device is deconstructed, and its smallest interior parts are extracted and microscopically observed. Visual patterns are harvested, as speculative representations of the data that was lost when this device ceased to function. While trivial, this data represents a sense of autonomy over personal archives, informing our identity constructs as they determine what is preserved, highlighted, and resurfaced in the future.
These images were captured in 2021, as a performance of autonomous data recovery. What happens when our machines default, with our data trapped inside of it? The only thing that remains, is its physicality.
When devices are broken, and data is not “in the cloud” it might only be retrieved with official data retrieval, that is not reliable. It might or might not work. In autonomous response, I break into my device to imagine what the experience of finding this data might look like. I look for it in the smallest components that I find inside. The patterns revealed are from the smallest components, including mostly glue and glass. In these I imagine my treasures memories, re-presented as encrypted.
Material prototype for a hard-drive of cyborg memory. Image by Nadia Bautista.
Exposing the intimate process of grief, tactile materials unfold on the meshed surface. The porous membrane reveals layers of love and loss, projected as memories, onto a weaving that exists as mourning between space and emptiness.
Red and black lines interface on a repurposed shower curtain embroidered both by hand and machine, with abstract images of screenshots of microbial lives, and original images of microscopic organisms found in still water. The resulting surface, is imperfect, a glitched representation, outcome of a random layout in which new under impossible predictions, improvable symbols are revealed.
Reflecting on predictive technologies, sections of this piece were scanned and overlaid with red squares representing predictive policing software used by NYPD. The image was printed on a transparent sheet, overlaying a poem. This piece was published by SFPC Dark Matters zine in 2022. Images by Nadia Bautista.
Intra-estructuras is a series of intimate observations of domestic and bodily matter including dirt, hair, plants, water, pimples, blood, fluids, scabs, burnt charcoal, herbs, and others. From an augmented perspective, I identify and mine patterns that reveal commonalities.
PRCSS, 2019. Wool, acrylic, spray paint, electrical tape, bleach on found fabric, 48 x 66 in.
Disrupting object-oriented computer science, prevalent in Human-Computer interaction patterns - PRCSS is an experimental interaction design project in which the potential of a process based methodology, guided by blind variation, repetition, and experience is mapped onto a repurposed fabric.
The limits of the surface are challenged, transforming it into something unidentifiable. The result is a hybrid, alive but inorganic, repulsing but embellished, that holds its process of transformation on the surface as a quality without a name.
The limits of the surface are challenged, transforming it into something unidentifiable. The result is a hybrid, alive but inorganic, repulsing but embellished, that holds its process of transformation on the surface as a quality without a name.
Piedra Blanda is a collaborative project developed by CARNE (A collective formed by Lucía Cozzi and Maria Olga Samperio that created urban and domestic interventions from 2014-2016) for Oh Boy! Exhibition in Savannah, GA. Piedra Blanda contemplates materials softly changing. In this piece, repurposed pillow cases are intervened over and over following blind variation. As the fabric becomes too weak to continue threading through it, we digitize it, bringing it back to its ‘hard’ state, creating ripples and textures that hint at new possible states of matter.