Introduction
The artwork Proxies is composed of six circuits arranged in coalescence. Some are connected, while others are merely placed alongside one another. Some are linked without physical wiring, while others are connected via radio waves. All of these are used to materialize a fabulation of control and synthesis. Proxies materialize cultures of repair through dynamic processes of synthesis, where various elements interact via translation and feedback mechanisms.
One such form of synthesis occurs through the translation of microvoltages generated by ferments into sound via software, rendering the biochemical activity of living matter as an audible phenomenon. Another form of synthesis emerges through the conversion of light intensity into sound, facilitated by an image scanner software and a lens directed at the ferment. The scanner’s software emits an auditory click at the conclusion of each sampling window—an occurrence that may be taken for an error. Not only as a malfunction, however, the click operates as an attentional signal that foregrounds the processes of translation and their contingent “errors.” These interruptions resonate with a post-anthropocentric feminist ethics of the Anthropocene, in which responsibility is understood as a capacity to respond to material transformations. The click thus enacts a form of responsiveness: a perceptual rupture that highlights error, the unwanted, and the residual, situating them in proximity to the ferment’s dynamic existence and the artwork’s ongoing synthesis.
Additional layers of synthesis unfold through technological mediation, exemplified by a Schmitt trigger circuit powered by a solar panel. The circuit oscillates in response to variations in ambient light, further emphasizing the contingent nature of synthesis as a process governed by feedback rather than preordained control. Feedback loops extend through radio waves, via a micro-radio transmitter, and through audio hardware, such as the sound card, reinforcing the artwork’s status as a live assemblage in constant responding.
Through these mechanisms, Proxies enacts synthesis not as a dialectical reconciliation but as radical contingency1, where care and repair arise through the articulation of human and more-than-human discursive practices. This articulation foregrounds an ethics of response, wherein attentiveness to material and ecological fluctuations becomes a mode of engaging with the unpredictability of the living world. In doing so, the artwork proposes a methodology for navigating the Anthropocene — one that resists control in favor of co-composition with the vibrant forces of matter.
Synthesis Fabulation
Fabulation, refers to the act or process of inventing or creating fictional narratives, often with an emphasis on imaginative reconstruction rather than strict adherence to realism. In literary and philosophical discourse, fabulation is associated with postmodernist narrative techniques that challenge conventional storytelling by embracing non-linear plots, metafictional elements, and self-referentiality. The concept has been explored in various theoretical frameworks, including the works of Gilles Deleuze, who interprets fabulation as a means of constructing alternative realities and resisting dominant historical narratives2.
Proxies presents a speculative fabulation—about control, exploring how different elements interact within a dynamic system. This arrangement generates a network of relationships shaped by processes such as transduction, translation, fermentation, digital signal processing, and feedback. Rather than a fixed or linear structure, Proxies functions as a multilayered synthesis machine, where each component contributes to an evolving and interdependent composition. Through this assemblage, the work questions conventional notions of authorship, agency, and the limits of control within technological and material systems.
Luis Buñuel’s That Obscure Object of Desire can be seen as a narrative about control, where sequences of seemingly unrelated terrorist attacks across France and Spain intertwine with the recurring cycle of seduction and frustration between double-identity-Conchita and Matheu. He, a distressed man, clutches his head in despair, weeping. He has been trying to free the semi-naked body of the woman he desires from an exceedingly tight under garment. The woman, much younger than him, resolutely refuses to relinquish her chastity and resorts to an array of strategies. The latest of these is the tight shorts fastened with small leather cords, which the man struggles to untangle. Frustrated, he threatens to destroy the garment, but his efforts are in vain.
I propose to overlay this cinematic image onto the implementation of Proxies. In Cet obscur objet du désir (1977)3, Luis Buñuel crafts a character, Conchita, portrayed by two actresses. Matheu, the protagonist, shows no surprise when she transforms into a different woman. There is no cinematic effect morphing one into the other—they are, in fact, two distinct actresses, yet Matheu desires them both equally. This duality may represent a deeply fragmented psyche within a single individual. Furthermore, Buñuel seems to reject the notion of identity as something that can be fully encapsulated by one person. By refusing to settle on one actress, he deliberately integrates two opposing aspects of a subject into the film without collapsing them into a single entity. Conchita, the woman, is thus represented by two actresses, embodying two poles of identity that coexist without subsuming one another.
In another scene, Conchita dances, her torso stretched and contorted, her head held high. Her movement simultaneously turns inward, toward an intimate sentient core. To the rhythm of a flamenco guitar, she performs an evocative dance. Her figure—tense, vibrant, and hieratic—seems to gaze upward and far beyond, transcending the bounds of this space and time.
What we observe in Buñuel’s refusal to choose between one actress or the other to represent a single subject—in this case, the young Conchita is a response that goes beyond dialectical resolution. Alain Badiou, in his text Cinema as Philosophical Experimentation, highlights the concept of disjunctive synthesis, a procedure analyzed in Gilles Deleuze’s Logique du sens4. Badiou conceptualizes this as a cinematic method that, through imagery, describes a type of synthesis that does not collapse opposites, more on the contrary, is a dynamic synthesis that preserves conflict, multiplicity, and difference5
Luis Buñuel disrupts and suspends the decision between one actress or the other, instead implementing the character through both women. At first glance, it becomes evident that Matheu’s struggle to possess or control the woman is at least doubled. The two women multiply distinct harmonic variations of personality: one is passionate, a dancer, and very young, while the other is more independent, aloof—almost cold—tall, stubborn, and severe. They reveal different if not opposite existential dimensions: one is frequently depicted dancing, while the other prefers to remain at home, reclining.
When Matheu attempts to untangle the intricate fastenings of Conchita’s chastity undergarments, he resembles someone patching a machine. Could his desire to possess her also reflect his desire to control her? His desire to possess her might equally be read as a desire to control her. More broadly, this interplay enacts a naturalized schema of control and conflict, which in Buñuel’s hands is pushed to the point of paroxysm, underscored by the explosions of terrorist violence in the background.
Rather differently, instead of seeking closure or dialectical reconciliation, a speculative synthesis emerges as radical contingency—a mode of ethical and political composition that embraces care as an active practice. This synthesis underscores the articulation of discursive practices with an ethics of response, positioning responsiveness as a dynamic and generative engagement with ethical dilemmas. Such an approach resists the reduction of ethical subjectivity to either pure affirmation or absolute vulnerability6, instead advocating for an ethics grounded in the capacity to respond, adapt, and co-create within evolving relational patterns. This reconfiguration invites a reconsideration of how control is conceptualized beyond the suppression of conflict.
Proxies make use of surrogates to enable synthesis and control in a material fabulation.
In artistic research, proxy reasoning operates when artists substitute one medium, material, or conceptual framework for another to explore, represent, or interrogate their subject matter. This substitution is not merely a heuristic shortcut but a fundamental aspect of artistic epistemology, enabling the exploration of otherwise elusive experiences, histories, or theoretical constructs.
For instance, in sound-based artistic research, artists working with field recordings or sonification often employ proxy reasoning by using sound as a surrogate for political, ecological, or metaphysical inquiries. In Perturbación Permanente7 (2017)8 the use of Very Low Frequency (VLF) recordings from Antarctica and the Atacama Desert functions as a proxy for historical and political erasure under Pinochet’s dictatorship. Here, the substitution is not arbitrary but carefully chosen to resonate with the themes of disappearance and disturbance, reflecting the conceptual and affective dimensions of the historical trauma. The surrogate reasoning at play enables an audience to engage with history through a medium that circumvents conventional historiographic representation, offering an alternative epistemic access to the past.
In A Journey That Wasn't (2005), Pierre Huyghe develops a speculative device to enquire the invisible in Antarctica that consists of a a 22-minute video piece, a series of photographs, an article in an art journal, and a reenactment performance of the Antarctic mission displayed through a concert and light show in the middle of New York’s Central Park. He uses an intricate type of narrative where a group of researchers are investigating an invisible penguin living in the Antarctic Circle, that is only possible to sense in the radio spectrum through special technology.
Speculative fabulation may be conceived as a methodological practice of constructing alternative realities through world-making. Its epistemological value lies in its affinity with forms of proxy reasoning, understood as the use of indirect indicators to access temporalities and material conditions that exceed the limits of direct human experience. Just as ice cores or lichens operate as proxies by preserving traces of ecological and climatic histories that predate human presence, speculative fabulation mobilizes imaginative narratives to engage with temporal strata and ontological possibilities foreclosed by linear accounts of human history. In this convergence, fabulation does not function as mere fiction but as a mode of inquiry that extends the scope of what can be known, sensed, and critically reflected upon.
From a methodological perspective, artistic research frequently employs models, metaphors, and performative acts as epistemic surrogates. This aligns with discussions on scientific modeling, where a constructed model serves as a stand-in for an otherwise unobservable reality. In artistic contexts, such surrogates may take the form of installations that embody speculative histories or soundscapes that proxy for ecological crises. These surrogate models are not merely representative but performative, producing affective responses that might not emerge through direct representation alone.
Ultimately, the relationship between surrogate reasoning and artistic research underscores the epistemic potential of proxies in creative practice. Donna Haraway’s notion of SF (Haraway 2013) as a material-semiotic sign extends the logic of surrogate reasoning into speculative and world-making (worlding) practices, where ideas function as proxies for other ideas, shaping the way we conceptualize reality. Her expansive definition of SF—encompassing speculative fabulation, science fiction, and scientific fact, among others—suggests that surrogate reasoning is not merely a cognitive shortcut but a performative epistemic strategy. Just as proxy reasoning in artistic research allows for alternative engagements with complex or inaccessible phenomena, SF operates as a surrogate framework (SF) that enables thought experiments, ethical reconfigurations, and speculative ontologies. The recursive nature of Haraway’s SF—where thought structures are themselves contingent on the speculative frameworks that shape them—aligns with the ways artistic research mobilizes surrogate reasoning to construct new epistemic and affective experiences. By recognizing the significance of the ideas we use to think other ideas, Haraway underscores the transformative potential of surrogate reasoning within artistic and theoretical inquiry, situating it as a crucial mechanism for both critique and creation.
For Donna Haraway, SF is a powerful material-semiotic sign that encompasses the richness of speculative fabulation, speculative feminism, science fiction, speculative fiction, scientific fact, scientific fantasy, as well as string figures and the so far (So Far). Additionally, she emphasizes that, given its world-making capacity, the ideas we use to think about other ideas are particularly significant9
Donna Haraway’s engagement with Marilyn Strathern underscores the significance of materialities in epistemic and ontological processes, particularly within feminist speculative fabulation. Strathern’s anthropological work, especially in The Gender of the Gift (1988), challenges conventional Western notions of individuality, kinship, and exchange by examining how relationality operates in Melanesian societies. For Haraway, Strathern’s approach exemplifies a mode of thinking that foregrounds partial connections and the situated, material conditions through which knowledge is produced. This aligns with Haraway’s broader argument that the tools, metaphors, and conceptual frameworks we employ actively shape the realities we construct, rather than simply reflecting a pre-existing world.
Haraway highlights Marilyn Strathern as a key figure in feminist speculative fabulation within academia10, a central figure representing the generative potential of anthropology as a form of speculative thought. Strathern’s method of "cutting the network" (1996) demonstrates an epistemological move that is not about reaching an ultimate totalizing synthesis but about making strategic interventions that reveal new patterns of relationality.
The “cutting the network” method by Strathern consists of dissecting the networks by systematically isolating and examining various nodes and connections that underpin social and cultural contexts. By cutting the network, researchers can identify and analyse the specific ways in which these relationships and connections are constructed and maintained thereby shedding light on the underlying cultural logics that govern social and cultural contexts.
This resonates with Haraway’s own insistence on SF—speculative fabulation, science fiction, and string figures—as a means of world-making that resists rigid disciplinary boundaries. In this sense, Haraway’s citation of Strathern is not merely an academic reference but an invocation of a methodological and conceptual practice that exemplifies feminist engagements with the materialities of knowledge.
Furthermore, Haraway’s reflection on the materialities we use to think about other matters suggests that the epistemic tools we deploy—whether scientific models, artistic practices, or speculative narratives—are themselves implicated in the realities they construct. This insight is particularly relevant to artistic research, where material and conceptual surrogates mediate complex inquiries into history, politics, and subjectivity. Just as Strathern’s anthropological work reveals the contingent and constructed nature of knowledge systems, Haraway’s emphasis on material-semiotic practices underscores the transformative potential of engaging with alternative epistemic structures. In this way, both scholars contribute to a feminist speculative praxis that is not only critical but also creative, reconfiguring the very grounds of knowledge production.
A speculative ontology can be defined by its use of creative methodologies to develop theories, often employing fictional scenarios, thought experiments, and other practices, rather than relying on traditional research methods. This approach draws on insights from process philosophy, speculative realism, and object-oriented ontology, emphasizing the dynamic interplay between thought and matter. The artwork Proxies embodies these theoretical reflections by presenting a material exploration of control. The material itself serves as tangible evidence of intra-material processes.
Other feminist thinkers have emphasized the importance of worlding processes in a reality that is manifestly entangled. Karen Barad (2007, 391–396) advocates for an "ethics of entanglement" (Barad 2012, 47) that recognizes the inherent ethical dimension of all worlding; Anna Tsing (2015, 46–52) has emphasized the transformative nature of responding "with" the world due to its indeterminacy; Deborah Bird Rose (2017) redefined response as the capacity to take care.
Synthesis as writing and as worlding and as taking care.
In The Passion According to G.H., Clarice Lispector explores the liminal zone where humanity is lost in the process of becoming the other—an insect, an animal . This transformative space, sharply theorized by Gilles Deleuze and Felix Guattari in A Thousand Plateaus, represents a zone of migration that challenges fixed identities and univocal representations. Clarice Lispector emphasizes the notion of "becoming animal" by exploring the limits of her humanity through her encounters with insects. Through this engagement, she ventures into an indeterminate zone of becoming, allowing her epistemology to be shaped and influenced by the materiality of the nonhuman other. In this process, Lispector becomes attuned to an alternative way of knowing — an animal or insect epistemology. Her attention to perceptual difference highlights the subtle complexities of this transformation and marks a shift away from a human-centered perspective. This migration toward the nonhuman is driven by an attunement to difference, which serves as an initial step toward care, fostering recognition of the other and feeling empathy.
The various processes activated by the Proxies assemblage can be understood as discursive practices that operate through transduction, translation, and feedback — functioning as more-than-human epistemologies. In this arrangement, the assemblage itself becomes a methodological framework that enacts a deviation from conventional systems of control. Each of these processes contributes to synthesis in a distinct way, unveiling emergent patterns of relationality and demonstrating how knowledge can be generated through dynamic, interdependent interactions between human and nonhuman elements.
Speculative Fabulation is less a matter of translation in any conventional sense than a practice of worlding through which novel affordances emerge. These affordances are not static attributes of models or metaphors but dynamic capacities that take shape within the iterative processes of artistic making, where translation, superposition, and entanglement generate unexpected patterns of relationality. Artistic practices, in this context, do more than represent; they activate figures and stories that reconfigure the very conditions of perception and response. The affordances that arise are therefore speculative in Haraway’s sense: they are situated, performative, and generative of new possibilities for living and thinking-with others in multispecies and more-than-human assemblages.
Ecotopies for the Anthropocene
The artwork Proxies can be understood as performing an ecotopy for the Anthropocene through its enactment of transduction, translation, and feedback. These processes not only destabilize traditional epistemological boundaries but also materialize an alternative mode of ecological thinking attuned to the complex entanglements between human and nonhuman agencies. In this context, transduction — the transmission and transformation of forces across different material and conceptual domains — reflects the interconnected flux of geological, biological, and technological processes that define the Anthropocene. By staging these processes, Proxies creates an ecotopy — a speculative site where more-than-human epistemologies emerge, inviting viewers to inhabit an altered perceptual register. This ecotopy resists anthropocentric frameworks by foregrounding material agencies and nonhuman perspectives, thereby fostering an ethics of care and attentiveness in the face of ecological crisis. In doing so, the artwork becomes a living diagram, exposing the imbrication of human and nonhuman discursive practices while imagining new possibilities for planetary coexistence.
Control replaced by Radical Contingency
Control, once considered a stabilizing force, is now increasingly supplanted by the notion of radical contingency. The interplay between synthesis and control suggests that while synthesis generates new possibilities and control serves to refine and direct them toward determined outcomes, these outcomes, however, may not always be purposeful. Control, in this sense, can be understood as the degree to which an outcome aligns with an intended purpose, while the absence of such alignment is perceived as a lack of control. This conceptualization raises the question of whether fermentation, as a process, aligns with purpose while this construct as such is limited to human perspectives.
For entities beyond the human—such as ferments, bacteria, yeast, and viruses—control does not exist, neither purpose although some manifestations may be interpreted as being under their control i.e.viruses. Humans often perceive themselves as separate from matter, as though boundaries exist where they are merely perceived constructs. The writer Clarice Lispector explores this liminal space, particularly through her reflections on the protozoan, recognizing that every aspect of human knowledge and perception would be transformed if one were to experience the world as a non-human. In a similar way, the rapidly changing environment challenges fundamental assumptions about reality, urging a reconsideration of how we conceptualize agency, purpose and control.
Dipesh Chakrabarty11underscores this imperative by addressing the radical transformation of the world due to climate change, biodiversity loss, and other anthropogenic factors. These crises necessitate a reevaluation of long-standing concepts and ideals. Notably, Chakrabarty highlights how freedom—a concept historically associated with human autonomy and sovereignty—must now be reconsidered in light of the Anthropocene. The traditional notion of individual freedom, often linked to consumerism and extractivism, is increasingly challenged by the realities of the climate crisis. This shift calls for a reconfiguration of ethical and political thought, moving toward frameworks of degrowth, repair, and adaptive learning that acknowledge the dynamic and interdependent nature of ecosystems.
Isabelle Stengers offers a compelling perspective on ethical engagement through her notion of an ethics of response, which she conceptualizes as an ethics of the event. Ethical action, according to Stengers, begins with interruptions—moments that destabilize prevailing narratives and open possibilities for new forms of engagement. Her Cosmopolitical Proposal (2005)12considers the composition of an inhabitable world as a collective project involving heterogeneous actors. Ethics, in this framework, is understood not as a closed system but as a sphere characterized by openness, non-closure, and continuous sensitivity to emergent conditions. This approach aligns with the imperative to rethink control and agency in the face of environmental uncertainty, advocating for a mode of responsiveness that embraces contingency, adaptation, and co-composition with the more-than-human world.
Within this framework, it is essential to reconsider the role of control, particularly in relation to the overwhelming loss of control triggered by climate change, war, extractivism, and diaspora. Rather than reinforcing traditional notions of control as dominance or regulation, we might reframe control through the lens of care. In this view, control could be supplanted by practices of togetherness, coalescence, moments of interruption, and acts of repair. Such a shift emphasizes relationality and mutual support, suggesting that responding to contemporary crises requires collective attentiveness and a willingness to engage with uncertainty through care-driven processes.
References
Badiou, A. 2019 Cinema as philosophical experimentation. In Philosophers on Film from Bergson to Badiou: A Critical Reader, pp. 291-307. Columbia University Press.
Barad, Karen. Meeting the universe halfway: Quantum physics and the entanglement of matter and meaning. duke university Press, 2007.
Braidotti, Rosi. "Affirmation versus vulnerability: On contemporary ethical debates." Canadian journal of continental philosophy 10, no. 1 (2006): 235-254.
Buñuel, L. dir. 1977. That Obscure Object of Desire. Internet Archive. Accessed 26 February 2025. https://archive.org/details/th...
Chakrabarty, Dipesh. "The climate of history: Four theses." Critical inquiry 35, no. 2 (2009): 197-222.
Deleuze, Gilles, and Félix Guattari. 1988 A thousand plateaus: Capitalism and schizophrenia. Bloomsbury Publishing.
Deleuze, G. 1989. Cinema 2: The Time-Image. Translated by Hugh Tomlinson and Robert Galeta. Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press.
Deleuze, G. 1990 Logique du sens. Columbia University Press.
Haraway, Donna. "SF: Science fiction, speculative fabulation, string figures, so far." Ada: A Journal of Gender, New Media, and Technology 3, no. 1 (2013): 18.
Haraway, Donna. "Staying with the trouble for multispecies environmental justice."Dialogues in Human Geography 8, no. 1 (2018): 102-105. 12
Lispector, C. The Passion according to GH. U of Minnesota Press, 1988.
Stengers, Isabelle. "The cosmopolitical proposal." Making things public: Atmospheres of democracy 994 (2005): 994.
Strathern, Marilyn. "Cutting the Network." Journal of the Royal Anthropological Institute 2, no. 3 (1996): 517-535.
Strathern, M. 1988, The Gender of the Gift: Problems with Women and Problems with Society in Melanesia. Berkeley: University of California Press.
"The stories we tell matter for the other stories we tell. Speculative fabulation is an example of worlding." Haraway then includes a fictional integral equation, described as "a defective trope and a serious joke," in an effort to articulate what an intersectional and intra-active theory might look like in Terrapolis. Ω∫Terra[X] = ∫∫∫∫...∫∫Terra(X X X X X ,t) dX dX dX dX ...dX dt = Terrapolis a X = things/physis, X = capacity, X = sociality, X = materiality, X =?? a (alpha) = no zoë, but rather EcoEvoDevo of the epigenesis of multispecies Ω (omega) = no bio, but rather recovering the pluriverse of Terra: t = time of worlding, not container time, but an entangled time of past/present/and what is yet to come Terrapolis." Donna Haraway
"Strathern wrote about accepting the risk of relentless contingency; she thinks about anthropology as the knowledge practice that studies relations with relations, that puts relations at risk with other relations, from unexpected other worlds." Donna Haraway
If I confirm myself and consider myself truthful, I’ll be lost because I won’t know where to inlay my new way of being — if I go ahead with my fragmentary visions, the whole world will have to be transformed in order for me to fit within it. Clarice Lispector
Becoming-animal are neither dreams nor phantasies. They are perfectly real. But which reality is at issue here? For if becoming animal does not consist in playing animal or imitating an animal, it is clear that the human being does not “really” become an animal any more than the animal “really” becomes something else. Becoming produces nothing other than itself. Deleuze and Guattari
Your browser does not meet the minimum requirements to view this website. The browsers listed below are compatible. If you do not have any of these browsers, click on the icon to download the desired browser.
