Caught between slides of screen

Caught Between Slides of Screen is a bricolage video essay which explores how the move towards digital/ bio genealogy practices, owned by large corporations, has created a convergence where DNA and personal digital data are being positioned as tools for immortality. In turning our gaze towards these practices, in which science fictions and technology corporations meet to form speculative products and patents – which market or promise immortality – this position piece, thinks about how posthuman feminism can offer alternate, if speculative, forms of immortality.

Cybernetic concepts of the techno-human and its feedback loops are ruptured as we employ the plasticity of feminist immortality to activate consciousness evading the control of biopower. This can be applied to cellular and AI generative technologies through a mode of continual merger where we seek to form a resistance to external figures and systems of control. Using Bennet’s political ecologies we ask: what if we could overwrite ourselves and merge into each other so our vibrant materialities cannot be separated and have no origin to reanimate or immortalise?

Caught Between Slides of Screen envisions an alternative immortality that unfurls and permeates our biological and data bodies, diverging and converging to embody a range of post-digital worlds. It seeps across boundaries – asking the viewer to voyeuristically feel, touch, hold, lounge, breathe, watch and be part of a feminist immortality dissolving the boundaries between cellular bio-power and the techno-human. Drawing on posthuman feminisms and new materialism writings, it seeks to disrupt practices that commercialise immortality and flatten the social category of women through both algorithmic selection and the proliferation of the AI gaze.

This film is a collaboration between Stacey Pitsillides and Ellen Sampson