I sent my mom's hometown a friend request
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i sent my mom's hometown a friend request meditates on the titular gesture, a yearning that is both aided and thwarted by digital mediation. The restriction of the movement of bodies, resources, and communications between Cuba and the US could only be circumvented by entry into the virtual; to become a new entry in the grand "new" archive of the Internet. Or, to immigrate once again. In many modern lives, distance has become central. Layers of digital mediation enfold us, siphoning from us time, culture, and labor. Now, artificial intelligence embodies a machinic archive, ingesting information not only to regurgitate it, but to classify it. An automated system of classifications, an undulating index, an archive -- these institutions perpetuately isolate, consolidate, and mechanize their records, along with the people captured therein. We make our home in a grand new diaspora of intellectual and cultural production. The works figured in this thesis function as a series of vignettes, in which visual e-waste, physical e-waste, home furnishings coagulate into new bodies. The chapters written in this thesis function, too, as a series of vignette-chapters encased in larger sections: WITHOUT A SKIN, WITHIN A SKIN, AND A SKIN ITSELF. In the first section lies "Intelligences" and "Diasporics," which outline a history of labor, machines, human knowledge, and the archive in order to better define how our modern machine, Artificial Intelligence, functions as a capitalist algorithm. In the second section are "Mediations" and "Machines," which identify the dispossession of diasporic subjects across digital and geopolitical axes, and subsequently frame the deconstruction of machines and bodies as a possible tool for emancipation. Finally, in the last section, "Bodies" and "Bones" delve into the way the theoretical underpinnings of this thesis manifested within a body of sculptural assemblages and installations.
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M.F.A