Imagining the cyborg in Na?huatl: Reading the videos of Pola Weiss through Haraway’s Manifesto for Cyborgs

摘要

the mid 1970s, when the Mexican television industry began to incorporate video as a broadcasting technology and video art was developing as a new artistic medium in the country, Pola Weiss. began to experiment with video technology to propose. new ways of. thinking about televisual images. and broadcasting. In 1978, she declared herself to be a.teleasta,. a producer of experimental televisual images (Weiss, 1978b),.and from then until she took her own life in 1990, she produced a series of television programs and videos in which she experimented with live dance performance, visual poetry, music, and visual e.ects. She conceived each of her videos as an act of giving birth, and her camera as her daughter— her escuincla (from the Náhuatl word for daughter) (Mendiola and Moreno, 1999). By using the video camera as an extension of her body and adopting television broadcasting as a conceptual model to reach audiences outside of the art world circuits, Weiss developed a unique approach to video. She combined the predominant articulation of video art as a medium of self-knowledge (Krauss, 1976, pp. 50-64) with a concern for exploring video's relation to television broadcasting and the medium's aesthetic and technical qualities (Hernández et al, 2014, p. 15). T rough this approach, Weiss sought to break with the media border—the separation between real experience and the reality structured by a medium (Spielmann, 2008, pp. 2-6)—in order to interpellate critical and embodied viewers (Garibay, 1984). Much like her contemporaries, including the US-based, Japanese-born artist Shigeko Kubota, Weiss was attracted to video because of its lack of history, which, as Midori Yoshimoto (2005, p. 187) has described, a.orded many 1970s female artists a clean slate, allowing them to launch their careers without the burden of an existing male tradition or established categories and genres. Like Kubota, Weiss invented her own categories to explain her practice and self, which overf owed existing frameworks