<p>“This is either to submit documentation and/or to enable us to collect your biometrics, unless you are bio-exempt.”</p>
<p><i>Unless you are bio-exempt</i>. What a fantastical, impossible category! If you look through more official literature on biometrics from the U.K. Home Office, you will come to understand that children and amputees with one or no fingers are bio-exempt, but so are diplomats. If you look more closely at this material, you will also notice that Home Office alternates between the term bio-exempt and the phrase “exempt from control.” I am finding my way towards a work titled bio-exempt, in which I aim to pull out all the term’s various meanings, such as biopolitical control: who has the legal right to be exempt from their embodied self and who has the right to remain unmarked, not indexed.</p>
<p>In a second work titled <i>The Prison-House</i>, I am reimagining Fredric Jameson’s conception of “the prison-house of language” as the prison-house of capture. I want to ask something like: If the architectural diagrams of Jeremy Bentham’s panopticon broadly mapped power and discipline in a previous era, what might such architectural renderings and diagrams look like now? To do this, I am making a series of immersive installations that collapse secret interrogation rooms, torture chambers, and the world of machine vision into one another to dramatize a “prison-house” structure that is mobile, flexible, often invisible, and thoroughly informatic.</p>
<p>Lastly, and perhaps of a more utopian sentiment, I’m working on a video-essay and installation (and collective!) titled <i>The Outside</i>. The outside is an idea often evoked today by speculative realism, object-oriented ontology, and others focused on the nonhuman turn, united in their pursuit to get out of what philosopher Quentin Meillassoux describes as the correlationist trap, that is, understanding the world only through the human ability to grasp, know, and perceive it. The other side of correlationism, Meillassoux proclaims, is “the great outdoors.” Yet, there is a more minoritarian outside that has been operative and at work before the rise of these other intellectual endeavors, oriented towards undoing totalities, making alternatives, and combating domination. Consider “the black outdoors,” discussed by Fred Moten and Saidiya Hartman; the post-capitalist politics in J. K. Gibson-Graham’s writings, when they argue that there is an outside to capitalism; Donna Haraway’s insistence that “there might indeed be a feminist science”; or even George Michael’s sex-positive “Outside,” when he sings, “Let’s go outside.” This outside might return us to Glissant again;as a way of being outside of “the ideal scale,” which goes to your point Simone, about freedoms and relation.</p>
<p>Lastly, and perhaps of a more utopian sentiment, I’m working on a video-essay and installation (and collective!) titled <i>The Outside</i>. The outside is an idea often evoked today by speculative realism, object-oriented ontology, and others focused on the nonhuman turn, united in their pursuit to get out of what philosopher Quentin Meillassoux describes as the correlationist trap, that is, understanding the world only through the human ability to grasp, know, and perceive it. The other side of correlationism, Meillassoux proclaims, is “the great outdoors.” Yet, there is a more minoritarian outside that has been operative and at work before the rise of these other intellectual endeavors, oriented towards undoing totalities, making alternatives, and combating domination. Consider “the black outdoors,” discussed by Fred Moten and Saidiya Hartman; the post-capitalist politics in J. K. Gibson-Graham’s writings, when they argue that there is an outside to capitalism; Donna Haraway’s insistence that “there might indeed be a feminist science”; or even George Michael’s sex-positive “Outside,” when he sings, “Let’s go outside.” This outside might return us to Glissant again;as a way of being outside of “the ideal scale,” which goes to your point Simone, about freedoms and relation.</p>
