STATEMENT

These machines respond to the embedded cyberfeminist consciousness of pataphysics, the "science of imaginary solutions."

Historically art and fiction have ignored the role of women as inventors and creators of fantasy, rather figuring them as landscape, object of desire or progenitors of the future. Some, like pataphysician Alfred Jarry, have merely considered women too "dim-witted" to understand the principles and possibilties of this imaginary science.

Because the ideas and images of "woman" many times have formed the backdrop to a conversation about the erotics of technology (even in today's cyberpunk), 'she' is often acted upon by the technology, which is usually out of her control. This is the narrative that many of my own pataphysical machines desire to reimagine and reverse, offering solutions to the way the imaginary has served as a tool for marginalization. The result is an expansion of gender categories beyond the stasis of the binary imagination and an opening to the "promises of monsters" (D.Haraway).

Pataphysics, then, as it reverberates with cyberfeminism, includes the following points, emphasis mine:

+ Pataphysics is lawless and therefore impossible to outlaw.     (Shattuck)

+ Pataphysics will be, above all, the science of the particular.     (Jarry)

+ 'Pataphysics treats all scientific theories not as a generality but just as an attempt, sometimes heroic and sometimes pathetic, to pin down one point of view as "real."     (Shattuck)


+ For Pataphysics, all things are equal.     (Shattuck)

+ The challenge is to continually define elliptic equations. So-called 'universal agreement' will always be easier than ellipses as it is always easier to perceive those curves having a single focal point, rather than two or more.     (Jarry)

The phallocentric exhibition "The Bachelor Machines" (1975) curated by Harald Szeemann, can also be seen as a reference. This show included Duchamp's famous auto-erotic work along with works by pataphysician Alfred Jarry. Catalog essays include writing by Michel de Certeau, Michel Carrouges, and Jean-Francois Lyotard, among others. The image on the catalog cover features an image of a woman's head with a fetus instead of a brain.

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