Our Motherboards are Temples (2021)

[Finalist Tasmanian Women's Art Prize Tasmania 2021]

Giclée print on canvas, Paraphernalia
83cm L, 52cm W, 6 cm D

‘Our Motherboards are Temples’ captures a glimpse into a familiar routine, an embodied ritual with a personal computer. Amongst an ‘alter’ of paraphernalia, a woman at her escritoire, navigates through a cosmography of analogue and digital networks: weaving plans, communicating, and participating in a nonlinear choreography of post dramatic happenings.

An evocative object, the computer is an autopoietic device. Describing “subjective side” of people’s relationships with technology feminist philosopher Sherry Turkle (2007) talks of computers as “intimate machines” that are “experienced as both part of the self and of the external world.”

The techno-cultural imbroglios encountered by many of us in the over-reliance on our computers to enable various capacities of work, life and socialising during the C-19 pandemic compels us to renew questions around our relationship with human and non human actors, interspecies entities and tangential assemblages formed with corporeally distant and local agents. The work is also a curtsy to the provenance of materiality and make up of contemporary computational devices - the metals, particles, and molecules from which they extracted.