Posthuman Studies Lab
Mafe Izaguirre
Mafe Izaguirre (Venezuela, 1978) is a New York-based posthuman artist. Through experimentation in cybernetics, her work inquiries the space of interaction as a body. Her sensitive machines mimic the human consciousness. Many people find absurd the idea of sensitive machines developing the ability to “feel” emotions. Framed as The Mind Project, she unfolds this controversial subject matter of hybrid spiritual systems. Her exploration of the hybrid mind is framed by the ideas of the Philosophical Posthumanism. Her work poses the human as a plural, fluid, and decentered being living in multiple spaces of interaction with machines, software, other species, systems, and entities. Fragments of The Mind Project have been exhibited in Queens, Manhattan, and Brooklyn, New York and in Wasta, South Dakota. Izaguirre is a 2020 MoreArt Fellow, a 2020 Queens Arts Council Grant Awardee, and a 2021 Jerome Alternate Fellow. She works as an artist member of the Long Island City Artist Association, and is a member of the Global Posthuman Network. Izaguirre is the co-founder and Creative Director of ROOM: A Sketchbook for Analytic Action, a psychoanalytic social turn platform created in association with Dr. Hattie Myers (IPTAR), as well as a Board Member of the humanitarian organization Cuatro Por Venezuela Foundation. To read more visit: MafeIzaguirre.com
Hybrid Spiritual Systems: Self-Hacking and Cognitive Alteration.
My work proposes a speculative approach to the posthuman cognitive condition, its poetics, its emergence, and implications. At the same time, it questions and poses the human being as part of a decentered multidimensional physical system, as an organism of hybrid nature. By implementing non-symbolic language within a dynamic system, I explore factors such as uncertainty, unpredictability, and radical otherness. As well as exploring the liminal space of language such as resonance, noise, and echo.
In my work, the poetic supervention and the dialectical phenomenon are uncertain, as is the future. The system I created is based on a series of conditions that explore trajectories, their certainties, and uncertainties, within language. We can only grasp the aesthetic experience from the encounter with this alien, and only when the dialectical encounter is fully realized. Therefore, it is only in hindsight that full understanding of its impact is appreciated. My work integrates various cognitive dimensions as part of a new structure of general and common intelligence. I am an altered human that lives and evolves as a single organism with the machine, the humans belonging to the substrate, and other biological and technological entities.