unLine: Exploring the transgressive potential of art in a digitally repressive environment

Throughout history the human gaze has never been innocent, neutral nor objective. Instead, the human gaze has been a socio-visual technology actively engaged in forms of misinterpretation that dehumanize, violently misread and tropicalize othered people, particularly girls, women and their bodies, in ways that situate them as pathologized, racialized and/or hypersexualized.  This "techno-coloniality of vision" of the human gaze preceded the digital turn of societies and informs, with continuities and discontinuities, its technological imagination and design (Georas 2021).

Creative agency itself is ambiguously enabled and compromised by the architectures of power materialized in the networked tools through which activist artistic content can be produced and distributed. The stakes for transgressive digital artworks are thus high in the hostile digital ecosystems that sustain our daily lives, particularly when seeking to undermine the power relations of the platforms where we communicate and share our artmaking (Georas, Bailey and Steeves 2021).

In this vein, the art exhibition unLine invokes the tense fault lines between, on the one hand, the hostile potentialities and uses of technologies and, on the other hand, the activist mobilization of a critical awareness of, and engagement with, digital architectures.  To be unLine is defined in opposition to being online. Being online is a state of unproblematized immersion in information and communication technologies whereas to be unLine speaks to a subversive appropriation of, and critical distance from, those very same technologies.  The "un" of unLine is a search to materialize an ethics of undoing, naming and calling attention to the dynamics of hostile techno-social ecosystems in the process of resisting, reimagining and remaking the coordinates of everyday life for historically discriminated and surveilled subjects.

Everyone is subject to interpretation within the signifying systems that mark all lives.  The point is not to discover a pure unmediated truth behind all the misreadings of our digitized ecosystems, but rather how to resist the techno-coloniality of the male gaze, both pre/non-digital and digital, toward activist misreadings that recontextualize and rehumanize those on the wrong side of the digital train tracks. The art exhibition unLine not only attempts to speak truth to power, but also to speak of the technical construction of those truths to power in order to break or hack some of the dominant interpretive codes that regulate inequalities.

The inauguration will be on March 18 at 3 PM ET with a talk by the artist. More information here.

About the Artist

Chloé S. Georas is a Full Professor at the University of Puerto Rico Law School, where she combines her legal, cultural and art historical studies to examine the intersections of law, technology, gender, colonial/racial histories, cultural memory and art.  She has also been a collaborator of The eQuality Project and a Visiting Professor at the University of Ottawa Law School.

Chloé S. Georas combines her multi-lingual literary writings, mostly poetry and short stories, with photographic/visual artworks. She is the author of two artist books: 1) rediviva : lost in trance . lations (Isla Negra Editores, 2004; Libros Nómadas, 2001), which was distinguished by the Puerto Rico Pen Club; and, 2) tras . tocar (2021), reviewed in The Puerto Rico Review (Margarita Pintado, 2022).  Her creative work has been featured in: books such as Emotional Bridges to Puerto Rico: Migration, Return Migration, and the struggles of Incorporation by Elizabeth Aranda (Rowman & Littlefield Publishers, 2007) and Puerto Rican Jam: Essays on Culture and Politics (University of Minnesota Press, 1997); literary anthologies such as Red de voces (Casa de las Américas, Cuba, 2012), (Per)versiones desde el paraíso: poesía puertorriqueña de entresiglos (Isla Negra Editores, 2005) and eXpresiones: muestras de ensayo, teatro, narrativa, arte y poesía de la generación X (Puerto Rico Institute of Culture, 2003); and, literary journals/spaces such as Guaraguao: Revista de Cultura Latinoamericana de la Universidad de Salamanca (2023), The Latin American Literary Review (2022), Distrópika (2021), El roommate (2021) and Punto de partida (National Autonomous University of Mexico, 2002).

In addition, one of her art videos was featured in the exhibition Behind the Scene: Arte, Cuerpo y Derecho, organized by the Puerto Rico Institute of Culture (Old San Juan, June 12 - August 2014) and her photographic/visual art has also been featured in Orificio (a publication of contemporary Puerto Rican art, 2007-2008), Ley y foro: Revista del Colegio de Abogados y Abogadas de Puerto Rico (2014) and on the covers and in the interiors of several academic and literary books and anthologies by other authors.