Mutations in Feminist Aesthetic Practices. Three case studies form the Centre of New Media and Public Feminist Practices

Taboo - Transgression - Transcendence in Art & Science, The University of Applied Arts, Vienna, Austria.

26-28 November 2020

Elpida Karaba

The paper concerns the research of the Centre of New Media and Public Feminist Practices (CPFP) based in Greece, University of Thessaly. It focuses on three case studies of the works by Vasileia Stylianidou aka Frank Lee, Panos Sklanvenitis and Valia Papastamou. Those are presented as case-study-narratives using various artistic methods, multimodal methodological tools and strategies, acting as implements for political post-digital affect and sensibility in the cognitive globalized economy of the artworlds today. More particularly, the video performative reading of Stylianidou, focuses on two violent female murders*, which happened recently in Greece. The work brings forth a new materialist approach, which describes the ‘transcorporeality’ between subjects and objects, the permeability between humans and others-things, such as electronic devices- with which it is enmeshed. Her work and methodology questions spectatorship for those involved, proposing an affecful visibility. The work of Panos Sklavenitis, Don Quixote derives from the celebrated novel, which has inspired an alternative 'manliness', whose variety of readings exposed a radical critique of the patriarchal constructions of masculinity and femininity. In Sklavenitis work as it happens in the original Cervantes novel, the reader can hear the different positions of the heroes, thus, one can hear Pantha's donkey's view, or rather the donkey's fantasy of an alter ego; a hybrid that resembles a sort of scientific genetic experiment and of which Sklavenitis draws a digital portrait. This creature is a catalyst in Sklavenitis' version of Don Quixote, as it works sweepingly over the idea of 'alternative' modes of existence. The alternatives will always be located within the patriarchal canon while the donkey's 'experience' presupposes a blasphemous post-human transcendence in consciousness. The work of Valia Papastamou develops a digital infrastructure which will interconnect feminist practices of art and activism not only as an actual archive but as a work of art which aims at the poetics of articulating, looking at the same time at the interconnections between actuality and virtuality. Papastamou proposes a mechanism, a bot which acts as a parasite in the social networks and uses web crawling and the dissolution and differentiation of the collected information,