• Part of the PhD-Workshop «Imagination as a Site of Struggle»
As a gesture towards but also a radical reformulation of the kind of work that Karen Barad has put forth, hybridizing the writing of the physicist Niels Bohr with that of Foucault showcasing how new object-concepts are configured in technoscience, I propose a hybrid writing that moves across the materiality of hardware, material-immateriality of software, and the flesh (Hortense Spillers’ term). As a messed-up technical report, the piece on the one hand goes over the pipeline of my biosensor-based project that transforms the sensor data—a stand in for affective tones of my experience of exiled migration—into sound, while on the other shows how the flesh of the displaced is fundamentally at odds with cascades of one-step-removed processes of computation. The report thus moves between the familiar format of hardware and software technical descriptions and disruptive anecdotes of the first-person exiled migrant as flesh—where the relationality between the personhood and anatomical properties breaks. The piece showcases how the failure of the homogeneity in the narrative opens the door to a whole new avenue of para-text that queers the rational synthesis of the text as the site of knowledge production: how para-text becomes text and text becomes para-text; how para-scientific thickens the scientific; and how purposeful decontextualization opens up the text to interpretations between para-fact and para-fiction.
Chair: Helen V. Pritchard, Shaka McGlotten, Ines Kleesattel, and Lucie Kolb.
Biography
Mona Hedayati is a researcher and a joint PhD candidate between Canada and Belgium. She has an MFA in digital media and an MRes in social-political art and design. Hedayati has been trained in computation art and her work aims to bring social thickness into science and technology practices that claim their fields as immune to social concerns.