Cycle Data and Body – Session #1 with Toni Navarro

Citlali Hernández and Núria Nia Nia open the Cycle Data and Body with Toni Navarro, who will offer a cyberfeminist look at the approach to the data of our bodies, the question of gender and the promises of the future of the first Internet:

“Cyberfeminism has been accused of overemphasising the political possibilities of digital de-corporealisation. For this theoretical and artistic current, the Internet offered the opportunity to escape identity restrictions by removing all physical and corporeal signs of communication, giving rise to interactions that would not be subject to judgements based on appearance or voice but would be based exclusively on textual exchanges. Anonymity would allow for a greater degree of fluidity and experimentation with identity that would lead to the dismantling of traditional categories of gender and race. However, Sadie Plant warned that “there is no escape from the body, from the flesh, and cyberspace is not transcendent”. Embodiment cannot be so easily eluded; the body provides the material point of contact with technological objects, but it has also been transformed by them. In this session we will address the role of the body in the cyberfeminist theories of the 1990s and ask how the socio-technical changes of the last decades have cancelled the futures that were then being targeted”. Toni Navarro.

Toni Navarro is a philosopher specialising in gender and technology. They is currently researching in the Vector de Conceptualización Sociotécnica promoted by Tecnopolítica (IN3/UOC) at Canòdrom, Ateneu d’Innovació Digital i Democràtica.

They occasionally publishes in media and magazines such as CCCB Lab, El Salto Diario, Píkara Magazine, El País, Temes de Disseny and Teknokultura. He has given seminars and lectures at: Centro Ciencia y Pensamiento (UNSAM), Festival Gelatina (La Casa Encendida), IV International Symposium Mutating Ecologies in Contemporary Art, Institute for Postnatural Studies, Instituto de Humanidades de Barcelona, Centro de Cultura Contemporánea de Barcelona (CCCB), Centro de Documentación y Estudios Avanzados de Arte Contemporáneo (CENDEAC), Biennal de Pensament Ciutat Oberta, Primavera Pro, Decidim Fest or FEM TEK Bilbao. He has been a guest lecturer in critical studies at EINA, Centro Universitario de Diseño y Arte (UAB).

They recently translated and wrote the prologue to Benjamin H. Bratton’s The Terraforming for Caja Negra Editora. They has also written the foreword for the books Xenofeminism by Helen Hester (Caja Negra, 2018) and The War of Desire and Technology at The Close of the Mechanical Age (Holobionte Ediciones, 2020), and has translated texts by several authors for the anthology Ciberfeminism. From VNS Matrix to Laboria Cuboniks (Holobionte Ediciones, 2019).

The Cycle Data and Body will comprise 3 sessions: in September and December 2021. This activity is part of the project Satellital Body by Núria Nia and Citlali Hernández, Artistic Research Grant Fundación Banco Sabadell-Hangar 2021, and takes as a starting point the Ciclo de Lectura y Pensamiento Cuerpo Tecnológico previously carried out by the artists with MATICS during their residency at Hangar.

Practical information Session #1
Date: 30 September
Place: Hangar
Time: 18 h

Free admission with reservation by sending an email to: hola@maticsbarcelona.net

With the support of: