The Cyborg Genesis

Womarts > The Cyborg Genesis

BIO

María Castellanos is a Spanish artist and researcher, she has a Degree and a Doctorate in Fine Arts from the University of Vigo, Spain, with an Extraordinary Phd Award 2016.

Her artistic practice focuses on the relationships between human beings and machines, and in recent years she have centred her research on hybridizations between cyborgs and wearables as a paradigm of the extension of human sensorial capabilities. And the creation of complex systems that promote the communication and the understanding between humans and plants.

Her work has won awards like VERTIGO STARTS (2017), a prize granted under the aegis of EU-Horizon 2020, an initiative led by Centre Pompidou and IRCAM , Paris, and the Fraunhifer. Gesellschaft, Germany, to foster collaboration between art practitioners and R&D projects. In 2016 she was awarded the Antón Scholarship for Sculpture Research from the Museo Antón in Candás (Asturias). Also in 2016 she was nominated for the STARTSPrize’ 16 at Ars Electronica, Linz (Austria) and the Japan Media Arts Festival, Tokyo (Japan).

During the last years she has been artists in residence at OsloMet University, in the framework of the FELT Project –FuturEs of Living Technologies–, 2019; a research stay at CITA– Center for Information Technology and Architecture–, in the context of VERTIGO STARTS 2017. Copenhagen; a research residency at SoftLab at Sliperiet, Umea Universitet (Sweden); and the Next Things residency at LABoral Centro de Arte (Gijón) and Telefonica I+D (Barcelona), 2015.

Her work has been featured in a number of exhibitions, including Jardín Cyborg, at Matatero Madrid, 2019; the solo exhibition Open Environmental Kit at MUSAC –Contemporary Art Museum of Castilla & Leon–, Spain, 2019; Eco-Visionaries at Hek, Basel, 2018; Look Forward Fashion Tech Festival, at La Gâite Lyrique Museum, Paris 2017; Human Factor, organized by Ars Electronica at DRIVE Volskwagen, Berlin, 2016; Ars Elctronica Festival 2016, Linz; Bozar Electronic Art Festival, Brussels, 2016.

She has been teaching at the Contemporary Art Master of the University of Vigo (Spain), and she has been invited by several Universities and Institutions to give talks and workshops about her artistic practice.

GROUP

Independent artist

NETWORKS

The Cyborg Genesis

 

 

 

The Cyborg Genesis is a speculative work about the future of human reproduction. I have sought inspiration from Shulamith Firestone’s 1970 feminist manifesto, which encouraged women to take seizure of the control of human fertility, distinguishing between sex and reproduction.

Through this work composed of a piece of videoart and the object showed in the video –a wearable machine capable of monitoring a posthuman uterus- the possibility of creating external and portable uterus is posed. This, along with other medical advances, such as sexual cells procurement out of other body cells, would allow that human reproduction not be dependent on our biology or sexual orientation