Aminder Virdee
Exosomatic Echoes, 2021
Biodigital audiovisual art | 2mins 42secs, 1920px X 1920px Full HD
Exosomatic Echoes exhibits as an MRI-generated, monochromatic, bio-digital, and moving audio-visual work, utilising transmedial programming, code, the artist’s lifelong lived experience, and personal medical archives (i.e. biodata, MRIs, X-Rays, CTs and diagnostic reports) to centre autonomy, subvert medicalised technologies, and reclaim practices of othering, and ableism, that continue to be quantified by those acting under the medical model of disability, and the medical industrial complex.
Exosomatic Echoes seeks to disrupt dominant ableist narratives, the clinical gaze, and the social enactment of the diagnostic gaze; in particular, the notion that science and technology serves to ‘cure’, ‘fix’, ‘restore’, ‘eliminate’, and ‘normalise’ the disabled body, so to conform to able-bodiedness, westernized beauty ideals, and normative performativity.
Sensorially,’Exosomatic Echoes’ dismembers the diagnostic gaze; the raw medical moving-imagery is fragmented, transposed, and replicated within a simulated ‘contact print’ aesthetic, used by photographers to aid the selection of images for enlargement or for identification purposes. The original MRI images have been augmented, thus subjected to deidentification, to background the diagnostic gaze and the othering of disability (and disability aesthetics), and bring forth the re-worlding of the disabled body.
The chaotic moving-imagery permeates a synthetic soundscape subversively satirising the sonic environment of a hospital, and exorcising intrusive recollections of the aural environment and sensibilities of medical institutions.
With this in mind, the work is an embodied audio-visual stim, transforming sensory experiences of medical rituals, pain, biodata, imagery, routines, sounds, memories, and the post-traumatic, into cultivated sites of radical crip agency. Here, the crip (disabled) cyborg body and technology is a site of wider possibility, and way(s) of being, that transcend preconceived ideals of able-bodiedness, aesthetics and normativity, and fuel re-making, re-worlding, and allow the re-imagining of disability futures.
Alt-Text
Moving-Images Description:
The visuals are monochromatic; depicting various shades of black, grey and white.
Seven by seven small squares come together to form one larger square. Some of the small squares are black and do not have any moving images, others contain circles and semicircles in varying shades, with moving images. Each of the smaller squares carry different ambiguous MRI and x-ray imagery, and these morph into each other at varying speeds. The smaller moving-image squares are familiar as they relate to the anatomy – such as the brain – but altogether as a whole, it is augmented beyond comprehension, and without discerning information.
Sound Description:
The soundscape bellows as a piercing, computerised, high-tempo, and high-pitched siren - but one with echoic cosmic ambience.
Exosomatic Echoes seeks to disrupt dominant ableist narratives, the clinical gaze, and the social enactment of the diagnostic gaze; in particular, the notion that science and technology serves to ‘cure’, ‘fix’, ‘restore’, ‘eliminate’, and ‘normalise’ the disabled body, so to conform to able-bodiedness, westernized beauty ideals, and normative performativity.
Sensorially,’Exosomatic Echoes’ dismembers the diagnostic gaze; the raw medical moving-imagery is fragmented, transposed, and replicated within a simulated ‘contact print’ aesthetic, used by photographers to aid the selection of images for enlargement or for identification purposes. The original MRI images have been augmented, thus subjected to deidentification, to background the diagnostic gaze and the othering of disability (and disability aesthetics), and bring forth the re-worlding of the disabled body.
The chaotic moving-imagery permeates a synthetic soundscape subversively satirising the sonic environment of a hospital, and exorcising intrusive recollections of the aural environment and sensibilities of medical institutions.
With this in mind, the work is an embodied audio-visual stim, transforming sensory experiences of medical rituals, pain, biodata, imagery, routines, sounds, memories, and the post-traumatic, into cultivated sites of radical crip agency. Here, the crip (disabled) cyborg body and technology is a site of wider possibility, and way(s) of being, that transcend preconceived ideals of able-bodiedness, aesthetics and normativity, and fuel re-making, re-worlding, and allow the re-imagining of disability futures.
Alt-Text
Moving-Images Description:
The visuals are monochromatic; depicting various shades of black, grey and white.
Seven by seven small squares come together to form one larger square. Some of the small squares are black and do not have any moving images, others contain circles and semicircles in varying shades, with moving images. Each of the smaller squares carry different ambiguous MRI and x-ray imagery, and these morph into each other at varying speeds. The smaller moving-image squares are familiar as they relate to the anatomy – such as the brain – but altogether as a whole, it is augmented beyond comprehension, and without discerning information.
Sound Description:
The soundscape bellows as a piercing, computerised, high-tempo, and high-pitched siren - but one with echoic cosmic ambience.
About the artist:
Aminder Virdee
www.aminder-virdee.com | @amindervirdee
Aminder Virdee is a British South Asian artist, writer, activist, creative access consultant, and Trustee at UK’s leading disability-led live music accessibility organisation Attitude is Everything. She is also the founder and president of Disabled Intersectional Voices in the Arts (DIVA), a disability-focused network (currently at UAL) generating sites of creative resistance against institutional and educational ableism, and co-founder of Cripjoy, a transnational, majority BIPoC, community of practice re-worlding mental health through an intersectional, anti-ableist, and anti-sanist, lens. Aminder is also co-writer, director’s attachment, and access-centred consultant for short film Crutches (2021) funded by BFI, with multi award-winning director Nathan Morris, and executive producers 104 Films.
As an artist, Aminder’s work has been commissioned, exhibited, and performed across the UK, including the National Theatre of Scotland, Lyric Theatre, Bonington Gallery, Lewisham Arthouse, Bow Arts, and Tate Exchange. Aminder views her artistic practice as a creative resistance inherently subverting and transforming spaces, routines, rituals, and memories, into political sites of radical agency. This traverses multiple disciplines such as social justice; crip technoscience; disability, race and diaspora studies; computer science; physics; biology; and philosophy. She also works across multiple artforms as a world-remaking and dismantling tool; endlessly adapting to a world built without intersectional disability in mind, these include digital and computational art, kinetic sculpture, installation, moving image, sound art, live art and performance. She often uses participatory systems to amplify unheard and unrepresented voices, and to connect lived experience to the public sphere. |