Honey Biba Beckerlees practice based PhD Digital Matters situates itself in the paradox between, on the one hand, the culturally wide spread assumption that cyberspace is bodyless and the internet is immaterial, while on the other hand the overconsumption of energy and the extraction, distribution and transformation of massive land masses in the consumption of raw materials in digital technologies, which end up as great amounts of toxic electronic waste and recently has given us an outlook to the depletion of several chemical elements.
The project seeks to find new understandings of - and ways of relating to the digital, by drawing on post-human and more-than-human perspectives on the technology. Inspired by feminist versions of quantum mechanics and (new) materialism, that question classic distinctions between mind/body, immaterial/physical and ultimately what can be considered living and not living, this practice-based research project seeks to make art works that take the body and the plastic resources back into the center of an understanding of the technology.
Through a method of intra-action inspired by Karen Barad, the project aims to make artistic experiments that facilitate new materials, forms of expression and processes with digital raw materials. From a notion of distributed agency the project asks: What new ways of cognitive comprehension lies in taking into consideration the entanglements between people and technology by tracing how chemical elements travel from nature into computers and humans? How is our understanding of an extremely temporary technology if we consider it in a perspective of deep time through the journey of minerals over thousands of years? Can one develop a new sensibility towards digital technology through art, that takes finitude into consideration?
