Donna Haraway's groundbreaking Cyborg Manifesto, published nearly three decades ago, situated cybernetics within a posthuman and postgender political context. Rejecting binary oppositions, Haraway's manifesto advocated for an inclusive and multifaceted approach, urging feminists to embrace the disassembled and reassembled nature of the cyborg self. Claudia Hart's exhibition, MY TRAVELS IN HYPERREALITY, simultaneously showcased at ANNKA KULTYS PHYGITAL in London and EXPANDED.ART online, explores a wide range of digital media and techno-philosophical approaches over two decades of her creative output.
CLAUDIA HART
(Music composed and recorded by Edmund Campion)
Recumulations
2010/2019
3D Animation, MP4 (colour, sound)
9 min 20 sec
1920 x 1080 px
Recumulations (2010-2019), a collaboration between Hart and performance artist Roberto Sifuentes, presents a video triptych featuring avatars in undefined black and white settings. These avatars move erratically, defying easy categorization of race and gender. The piece reinterprets Trisha Brown's Accumulations, challenging rational systems of movement and merging material bodies with digital avatars, blurring the boundaries of corporeality and reality.
CLAUDIA HART
(Music composed and recorded by Edmund Campion)
Processing History
2019
3D Animation, MP4 (colour, sound)
7 min
Processing History (2019), premiered at ANNKA KULTYS PHYGITAL, disrupts linear notions of time by combining Chicago Modernism, classical architectural motifs, cultural symbols, and digital aging techniques. Hart overlays historical and futuristic imagery onto stone Caryatids, creating a temporal countdown that moves both forward and backward. This video work traces cultural history, as the Caryatids morph and sway within a hallucinogenic glitch animism.
Time's impact on the body emerges as a recurring theme in Hart's practice. In The Seasons (2007) and The Swing (2006), Hart explores unconventional temporalities through depictions of nudes. The Seasons features a seated woman with vines growing from her melting body, symbolizing the creeping passage of time. The Swing showcases a Rococo-styled 3D avatar swinging amidst trees shedding their leaves, evoking a melancholic and serene sense of oblivion. In Dream (2009), the body is almost entirely dematerialized, floating in a monochromatic digital environment reminiscent of x-rays and visceral bodily elements.
Hart's exhibition also includes two works that represent contrasting approaches to time and subjectivity. Timegarden 01 (2004), part of her "timegardens" series, dynamically cultivates virtual landscapes calibrated to temporal events. The video unfolds over 40 minutes, mirroring the average time spent at a group exhibition, with a rapid seed-to-decay progression accompanied by subtle plant-like sounds. Conversely, More Life (1998) lasts a mere four seconds, panning rapidly in and out of a pixelated television screen showing a cartoonish pink bear uttering the phrase "I want more life, fucker." This work challenges anthropocentrism and the dominating narratives of technology.
CLAUDIA HART
(Music composed and recorded by Edmund Campion)
Dream
2009
3D Animation, MP4 (colour, sound)
7 min 50 sec
1920 x 1080 px
Hart's multidimensional oeuvre transcends binary frameworks of human and nonhuman, artificial and real, mind and body. She navigates the realms of the hallucinogenic and the technical, employing sensuality and the uncanny to counterbalance historical investigations and speculative futures within the realm of simulation. Through her art, Hart breathes life into Haraway's proclamation that we are all cyborgs, encouraging a co-created and ever-evolving history of post-photographic digital practice.