Me sonrojaría si pudiera (I’d blush if I could) questions the gender bias of contemporary digital archives and addresses the increasing feminisation of technology through devices such as voice-activated systems and other forms of artificial intelligence.
Navigating archival images and different audiovisual imaginaries around various sentient beings (humanoid robots, voice-activated systems, chat bots, gynomorphic and zoomorphic social devices), the artist experiments with the critical use of archival and found images, and generic images drawn from various commercial platforms.
Through her interventions in these neoliberal archives, Cortiñas’s artistic practice reveals something ominous at play – simulations, power, surveillance – while stimulating ways of de-centring and displacing their hegemonic prerogatives.
As in her video essays and installations, this performative talk is a collage-like audiovisual narrative that combines found images with documentary and speculative strategies. Starting from the process of montage as a form of writing, Cortiñas invites us to an archival activation that bursts into today’s digital repositories and questions memories under construction. This work questions the pervasive patriarchal codes of these repositories and the illusion of a democratic digital culture.
Cortiñas’ audiovisual narrative uncovers the paradoxes of simulating organic and sensory experiences through new technologies that subjugate human and non-human living beings in new ways, and impede genuine affection, accessibility and equality.
[Streaming event as part of the third edition of PLECS]
