The Elastic Self + A Loving Woman
a range of intransigent questions apropos of human sexuality in the digital age
Pranya
Project Description
Women are not born, they are invented. This work addresses a range of intransigent questions apropos of human sexuality in the digital age utilising the Fembot, or sentient female sex-robot, as its core motif for all she can speak to the self-reflexivity of womanhood and the obligation to pleasure. Two mediums are employed to this purpose: the first is a poetic video-collage installation chiefly concerned with provocation and libidinal affect projection mapped upon a textile sculpture — an “Eldritch pussy” — entitled A Loving Woman. The second, a print manifesto-zine called The Elastic Self more explicitly didactic in its fervour, furnishes the installation exhibit with authorial context. Altogether, this comprises an auto-theoretical and auto-ethnographic exploration of how desire is articulated into sex, what constitutes good sex, and what good sex is politically good for with a resolutely queer pro-perversion position. Collaging theory, film, and pornography with personal reflections in a process the VNS Matrix’s Bitch Mutant Manifesto calls “textual plunderphonics” (or patchwork referencing), it transgresses the cyberfeminist canon, broadening its scope to include texts on desire, deviancy, and decay. An imagined world is propositioned, where a fembot is placed in a dynamic with a fellow fembot instead of an owner, in a hybridized system I named the Folkbot. In this world power imbalances are thusly restored, each party in the network is coded to prioritize the pleasure of the other.
BIO
Hailing from New Delhi, India, Pranya is a new-media theorist and code poet. They may have parted ways with the fashion industry in favour of an unfettered commitment to life as a creative practitioner, but their textile design roots were not abandoned in the process. She is presently in pursuit of her MFA from OCAD University, over which period she has expanded her artistic practice to involve interactive installations, walking simulators, collaborative workshops, and live performance while retaining employment as a teaching assistant. Their personal writing is a lifelong inquiry into the vagaries of desire and gender, examining the politics of the body and pleasure aligned with the legacy of cyber-feminism, the fruits of which can be sampled in the manifesto The Elastic Self. Rooted in a new materialist understanding of post-human and non-human intelligences, embedded in and drawing from nature, it feeds everything she creates. All the sardonic disguises in the world could not conceal her hope, try as she might.