Maite Segués Merino

6.2 Hybrid Bodies and Collective Creation from Self-printing: A Visual Arts Based Research (Paper)

Maite Segués Merino – University of Granada, Spain

Alicia Arias-Camisón Coello – Universidad de Almería | Universidad Internacional de la Rioja, Spain

Abstract:

This project explores the use of self-printing as a way of collective creation, which explores the intersection between the physical and the digital. Through deconstruction as an artistic practice, we relocate the physicality of the human body to the digital space, where it is subjected to distortions and deformations, and then printed, generating a new configuration of its appearance and questioning the boundary between the technological and the human, and between the individual and the collective.

The creation of experimental products – such as the zine – emerges as a space of agency where the material and the symbolic entangle to generate new meanings. The material “speaks” or gives expression to itself in the continuous process of transformation. The material itself invites folding, tearing, and engaging in a visual proxemics, producing an intimate, reflective and participatory interaction that challenges the current hypermediated models.

Furthermore, the body image, when subjected to digital manipulations and reprinted, leaves its organic nature to become a hybrid assemblage of physical and digital elements. From a posthumanist perspective, the human body is understood as being in constant mutation and interdependence with the technologies that surround it, and that through collective practice coexist and co-produce, generating a complex network of new interactions through a dynamic and new materiality. The project moves between disciplines such as visual art and cultural studies and establishes intermediality from the physical to the multimedia.