Megan Beckwith and Kialea Nadine Williams
Artist Statement
The Chthulucene is a post-gender cyborg figure that transforms the idea of physicality, one which is caught between times, living both in the past and the future. Like its Sci-Fi namesake, the Cthulhu, the Chthuluscene is a mixed assemblage of parts, bits, and sections drawn from various human, animal and digital elements. The feminist theorist Donna Haraway extends her ideas of the cyborg in her book Stay-ing with the Trouble, Making Kin in the Chthulucene, and describes the need for a different physicality; as we move into a new period of being, “the Chthulucene reflects a world where the human and nonhuman are inextricably linked in tentacular practices”. The Chthulucene is a hybrid being, and one way we could represent ourselves in a virtual future and how existing in virtual places might impact us physically and emotionally. How will we move and behave in virtual space with little or no perceived limitations and with a body that has extra or even limitless possibilities? This work explores how we may represent our-selves in a virtual future, the boundaries of a hybrid virtual body, and how this informational figure could affect our physicality, sexuality, and perception of self. and how will it behave in a virtual future?
About the artists
Megan Beckwith is a transmedia artist who combines dance and digital media. Her practice explores the intersection of physicality and technology through the figure of the posthuman cyborg. Beckwith com-bines her dance performance with technologies such as stereoscopic imagery, 3D illusions, motion cap-ture, virtual and augmented reality. She is currently Digital and Screen Dance Lecturer and the Digital Production Fellow at the Victorian College of the Arts, Faculty of Fine Arts and Music, University of Melbourne.
Kialea Nadine Williams is a dancer and academic who brings a powerful physicality to contemporary movement. She trained at London’s Rambert School of Ballet and Contemporary Dance before joining one of the UK’s leading contemporary dance companies, Phoenix Dance Theatre. She has worked with the radical Michael Clark Company in England before joining the Australian Dance Theatre in 2008. Wil-liams is an independent dancer, creator, actor, puppeteer and educator who is currently a Lecturer of Dance at the Victorian College of the Arts, University of Melbourne.
Credits: Megan Beckwith and Kialea Nadine Williams