desire and the uncanny - exploring digital worlds with marisa
MAYA: Can you do a quick breakdown of the project?
MARISA: Meet me by the pixel stream is a sculptural and digital project that I'm developing with Grace Wardlaw, a glassblower and artist. We have these glass pieces and metal lily pads that hold two different animations. The animation is what I've developed for Club Rambutan. The idea is to create this world where we’re questioning sexuality in a postdigital or postgender-based world.
Below are work-in-progress images courtsey of Marisa Müsing and Grace Wardlaw.
We're positioning the digital space as the future environment where we can explore our sexualities and concepts of gender. The inspiration came from this poem, “The Goblin Market” by Christina Rossetti, which was written in the 1800s.
The poem is a fairy tale of two sisters - it’s a little sapphic and queer coded - where one of them gets lured into this forest where these goblins have very desirable fruit for her to eat. When she eats them, she becomes ill, then the other sister has to go into the forest to get the fruit in order to bring her back to life. The second sister gets the fruit but refuses to eat it in front of the goblins, and they get nasty and creepy.
There's this strange element of desire, then fear and danger that comes from the story. The actual history of the poem is inspired by Christina’s friend, a model who died of drug overdose, and was in the art world during the Pre-Raphaelite movement in the 1800s. Rossetti was drawing parallels between the desire and fantasy of the art world to the realities of it with drug overuse, starving yourself, etc. We wanted to create an updated version of the Goblin Market comparing it to the digital world today.
Are we ourselves the problem online? We have this very enticing space that we've built for ourselves and are acting within to portray our identities in a certain way, is it for ourselves or for the algorithm?
MAYA: What would you say identity is and how would you define it?
MARISA: Identity is how you perceive yourself or want to be perceived in the world. I don't think it needs to be a marker of where you're from necessarily. That often ties into it, and feels like who you are as a person. I myself am Chinese and German and was born in Canada, so my parents and grandparents wereall from different parts of the world. Having a mixed race background and recently coming into my own sense of queerness, showed me that there's something strange about being part of these mixes of markers, not really fitting into any specific box and always kind of feeling very floaty.
That's something that I have learned to learn [laughs]; your identity is constantly something that you're editing and revising. I’m constantly changing, but I feel like myself. I'm often in this fluid world.
It's like, what am I, where am I, who am I?
MAYA: What aspects of identity are you looking to share with your project?
MARISA: Femininity is constantly changing. I'm quite interested in how it is explored online, with hyperfemininity like, “e-girls,” “girly pop,” spaces, and then also the trans, non-hetero, androgynous elements that we can play within ourselves. This idea of, I don’t know, seeing yourself as like a dragon online or something, there's so many variables as to how you define yourself in the digital space. We're very curious about how the influence of digital also changes how we perceive ourselves physically, too. There's this relationship between our own physical bodies and then what we present outwardly through these personas on digital accounts that we hold, or relationships we have with people online or offline.
Below are two memes Marisa provided as part of her references this project (lol).
MAYA: You discuss cyberfemininity a lot. Is this what you're talking about and how do you define that?
MARISA: There's so many different types of cyberfeminism. I don't really know which one I identify with the most. Legacy Russell’s work is really inspiring to me, like Glitch Feminism, which she wrote in 2020. It describes the digital self as something that is meant to disrupt and distort, and she uses words like “haunting” or “creep” online, where you are actively opposing the system or fiddling with what is already out for us. We are constantly trying to play with what is the self and how we are being perceived online. That is a question always with cyberfeminism, especially right now. I mean, cyber feminism has existed since the 90s, but under different circumstances. It was a westernized concept for a long time for middle class white women within liberal arts or academic spaces, where it wasn't really accessible as a term for everyone. It's really changed and there's so many different variations now of what that can mean. There's, you know, indigenous futurisms, cyborg witches, transhackfeminism, ecofuturists and other guerrilla theorists that assert cyberfeminist practice in different ways. There's a lot to play with because of that. And that book makes it really exciting.
MAYA: To jump off of that, what do you think are the biggest differences between how cyberfemininity is used in like queer spaces versus heteronormative spaces?
MARISA: Both queerness and cyberfeminism are big buzz words right now, which is a funny thing. Sometimes I use them in ways where I think, maybe this isn't the right term to use, but it's the only one that I can find that makes the most sense. In heteronormative spaces, there's walls that are built up with limits on who can access it and why.
Like TERFs (trans-exclusionary radical feminist), how they're like, “oh, feminism is for everyone but these people,” and that doesn't make any sense. In queer spaces there's more access, especially for POC and marginalized communities, that allows for a more open, honest conversation and connection to others in very grounded ways. I've been looking into a lot of witchcraft recently, and there's so much that connects to indigenous practices of seeing the body [as] not be the center of everything.
We are a part of a landscape of different beings and elements and it's not always just about us. It's about how that connects to everything else.
There's a lot more beauty and nuance and weirdness within queer spaces than heteronormative spaces. Queer as a word means to be angled; it’s opposed to the straight line or the direct. It’s always following this other path, moving, meandering rather than going from point A to point B.
MAYA: Yeah, that's a really, really good way to put it. Another question I had is, there's a lot of intangible ideas here. How did you go about making them tangible?
MARISA: When we first started the project, it came from the poem and then we thought, “What do we do with this?” It ended up turning into a world building project, because we both work through creating spaces or environments. My work personally tends to be within watery environments or dewy spaces; there’s something interesting about finding softness in a technological space. We wanted to create an environment where there were these lilypad structures that are holding glass seed pods, which are reflections of the body being absorbed or blossoming.
I started to look into hydrofeminism, which is another kind of subsection within feminism written by Astrida Neimanis, and the concept that we are bodies of water. As humans, we have water in our system. We ingest water, we expel water. It’s a part of us, but also what we do to the waters and pathways around us, which is something that we should put more care into. With the global infrastructure right now, there's so many toxins and industrial waste spilled into our ecosystems and destroying our habitats. As the fish start eating them and we eat the fish, the toxins become part of our bodies. All of our internet cables are underwater pathways that are the connections to all of us digitally right now. We rely on these resources to tie us together in very material formations. It's not just an ephemeral quality, it’s something very tangible and a real connection for us.
“Slimy girl”, a render from Marisa’s final project
MAYA: So in your project, are you portraying [Point] B as grotesque or beautiful? I was curious that if you're focusing more on softer environments, how are you going to bring the grotesque into it? Or are you going to lean more towards the beautiful?
MARISA: It's grotesque enough that it's beautiful, or so beautiful that it's grotesque. With digital imagery right now, [my partner and I] are really curious about this idea of creating these sexy digital watercolor goblins through this project. This environment is for these enticing, creepy, sexy trolls. Maybe that's what we are! I tend to stay within this beautiful space, and there's a lot of excitement when it strays into something weird or worse in some way. It's not just about aesthetics necessarily, it's a question of what is being said, and why is this character like that? What is that strange element in the scene that's changing how you feel about it?
It ties into this idea of the uncanny valley, where it’s distorted enough that it makes you begin to question your environment and space.This uncanniness ties into the physical sculptural pieces, like the fact that these lily pads and seeds are made out of materials that aren't natural, industrial materials like glass and metal. There's always a lot more to work with when it starts to become gross or creepy rather than purely beautiful.
Below are a few final captures from Marisa and Grace’s exhibit. Image credits to Marisa Müsing and Alison Postma.
MAYA: Yeah, the line is really blurred. Is there any context you think an audience would need before viewing your work, anything you would like to say beforehand before they see it?
MARISA: It would be good for them to read the poem beforehand. Maybe it wouldn't explain anything, but it would build the narrative for what we're working through with this new project. The question that we were asking ourselves is “how did we explore our own sexualities online?”. When was that moment? That's what drew us to these different parts of the project. That's an open question for people like, when was that moment for you? What do you remember? Who was it with or what thing was it with? I’d ask people to be open with the idea of what body and identity can mean for you. It's different for everyone, especially in digital spaces.
You can see Marisa’s full final project by purchasing 03: The Identity Issue. It is also currently being featured in “I want you to see this” at Xpace Cultural Centre in Toronto.
