Speculative Fabulations for Technoculture’s Generations: Taking Care of Unexpected Country

Abstract

When I first saw Patricia Piccinini's work a few years ago, I recognized a sister in technoculture, a co-worker committed to taking 'naturecultures' seriously without the soporific seductions of a return to Eden or the palpitating frisson of a jeremiad warning of the coming technological Apocalypse. 2 I experienced her as a compelling storyteller in the radical experimental lineage of feminist science fiction (SF).In a SF sense, Piccinini's objects are replete with narrative speculative fabulation.Her visual and sculptural art is about worlding; i.e., 'naturaltechnical' worlds at stake, worlds needy for care and response, worlds full of unsettling but oddly familiar critters who turn out to be simultaneously near kin and alien colonists.Piccinini's worlds require curiosity, emotional engagement, and investigation; and they do not yield to clean judgments or bottom lines-especially not about what is living or non-living, organic or technological, promising or threatening.Lindsay Kelley, a graduate student in my 2004 seminar in bioart and critical theory, playing brilliantly with Still Life with Stem Cells and Young Family, awakened my passion for Piccinini's corporeal practice of ethically inquisitive fabulating in the heterogeneous media of her collaborative work habits.So I set about learning what these worlds might be like and how they invite the risk of response, of becoming someone one was not before encountering her human and non-human critters.1 This paper was previously published in (tiernas) criaturas, catalogue of the ARTIUM exhibition of Patricia Piccinini's art, Vitoria-Gasteiz (Spain), 2007, pp.100-107. 2 For more on naturecultures and Piccinini's Surrogate (for the Northern Hairy-nosed Wombat) (2004), see Haraway, When Species Meet.

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