Seventeenth International Conference on the Arts in Society

Abstract

Through this paper, I present the theoretical underpinnings and tensions within my recent autoethnographic video “Self-Service” that explores the process of displacement of meaning from the recording of my personal narrative of forced migration all the way to computer-generated signals, taking into account the many instances of translation that occur within the human-machine agential flow. The autoethnographic as a method acts as a superimposed stratum that interrogates how boundaries are constructed and deconstructed between inside and outside, between human and machine, between bodies and communities, and between multiple sides of hyphenated identities where the recollection of temporal-spatial fragments of memory dissolves into computer-generated signals. Through deconstructing and exposing this process, I will illustrate how the human-machine continuum transcreates a flow that hinders firsthand politics of identification (of the forced migrant) as the figure of ‘the stranger’ which makes up for the consumption of difference as a commodity. By offering an otherly process of communication in the making that conveys the affective imprints, I will then underscore how this practice-based project offers a differential semiosis that blurs the homogeneity of self to instead gesture towards the reassemblage and reanimation of socio-technical constructs. Through enfolding the gendered, racialized narrative, my aim is to bring to the fore how the gestural engravings in the voice can construct a differential space of encounter where, as an inter-embodiment, affected by and affecting other bodies, human and machine meet, overlap, clash and flux.