The Glasgow School of Art

Faith Wilding
'Cyberfeminism Interrogates Biotechnology: subRosa's Participatory Information Performances' watch video

Human bodies have always been culturally constructed and technologically modified through technologies of tool making, agriculture, textile production, cooking, chemistry, medicine, and language. Today, new biological bodies, bearing high 'biovalue', are being created through genetic engineering, inter-corporeal transplants and stem cell cultivation. Many knowledge/power systems and market practices intersect on this biotech frontier: visualisation and computing technologies, corporate science, religion, philosophy, ethics, feminist and post-colonial theory, transplant medicine, and genetic research. There is surprisingly little public debate and critical analysis, however, engaging with the philosophical, ethical and political issues raised by the new bio-sciences, which have ushered in an age of 'interspecies technologies' that introduce irrevocable changes in reproductive and generative processes. Using examples from the work of the cyberfeminist artist collective subRosa, this lecture takes a critical look at cultural meanings and representations of reproductive and recombinant biotechnologies, the production and banking of distributed, patented, migrating bodies, and the global flow and exchange of bio-property and bio-value.

Faith Wilding is a multidisciplinary artist, writer, and Chair and Professor of Performance, School of the Art Institute of Chicago. A co-founder of the Feminist Art Movement in the USA, Wilding has exhibited extensively in solo and group shows for 30 years in the USA, Canada, Europe, Mexico, and Southeast Asia. Wilding also cofounded and collaborates with subRosa, a reproducible cyberfeminist cell of cultural researchers whose recent performances/exhibitions include: Yes Species, NGBK, Berlin; BioDifference, Biennial of Electronic Arts, Perth, Australia; and International Markets of Flesh,Performance International, Mexico City, and Merida, Yucatan. Publications include: Domain Errors! Cyberfeminist Practices (Autonomedia, 2003); and numerous essays, including in The Power of Feminist Art, (Abrams,1995).

Presented in collaboration with CCA Glasgow

Hosted by The School of Fine Art, The Friday Event Lecture Series is The Glasgow School of Art's flagship public lecture series, and brings major international speakers (including artists, architects, designers, historians and cultural theorists) to the city of Glasgow.