The Dadabyte Theater — Brandy Trigueros

Welcome to The Dadabyte Theater: a cyberspace of mixed timeline and an ode to the Dadaists and Bauhausian artists of the 20th century. As opposed to the crush of steel, we are currently facing a crush of data within the present technological information revolution. Using the studio as a stage for this in-camera autoportrait work, I aim to reflect a theatricalization of the “real,” an attempt to find balanced modes of being in a hyper-connected, ever increasing, mechanical society dominated by technology. By using products of industry, I attempt to illustrate the constraints, contradictions, and complexities of our technological entanglement and chose to explore my own agency and autonomy through this work.

Parts of my body recede into the imagined dark spaces of history and the Internet, as other parts are being shaped and forced to conform to expectations of femaleness within regimented societal structures. Within the burgeoning, unchanneled broadcast of snackable short-form content and communication: texts and tweets for example – what gets lost is history, knowledge and critical inquiry. The female body is historically regimented and contorted – from the ruff, the corset, the bra, to the current data stream of selfies, social network cyborg identities and political dismantling of our rights.

Growing up, I experienced generational shifts in technology, passing out of the pre-digital to digital – we are crossing into the new frontier. Autonomous machines of war, labor, pleasure, care, companionship and other technological systems of control, domination and comfort are being produced within this dizzying systemic capitalist merry-go-round. In the current state of rapid archaicness of built-in obsolescence, I use referential technologies that still function but are mostly obsolete socially. Throughout history, each system, from a monarchy to corporatocracy, has forced segments of society to struggle for agency in these ever-expanding social, economic worlds. Examining history allows us perspective of what has been lost, and what has been gained, in order to inform a path to the future.