Abstract
As a Latinx artist and scholar working with performative installations, I propose digression as both a deviation and a method of embodied resistance in contemporary visual culture. Drawing on Mariana Ortega’s concept of “being-between-worlds”, I understand digression as a necessary artistic and political practice for inhabiting layered temporalities and cultural identities simultaneously — migratory experience, digital presence, and embodied memory. Through works such as Thinking of the Self, the Disappearing Self series, and the Dimensional Bodies series, I create a compendium where these digressive practices serve as aesthetic strategies of refusal and survival. These installations enact interventions between the analog and the digital forms, challenging contemporary logics of time that seek to stabilize a fragmented body, reconciling presence and absence to resist dominant logics of time and selfhood. My work employs various technologies to explore how a migrant body exists in transmission, tracing gestures that become a site of negotiation between hybridity and otherness. Digression emerges as a poetic and political act that creates affective spaces of refuge for the multiplicitous self. This work contributes to current dialogues on digital aesthetics and cultural technologies by thinking about how image-based practices shape and resist the visual logics of identity in contemporary digital culture.
Details
Presentation Type
Paper Presentation in a Themed Session
Theme
2025 Special Focus—From Democratic Aesthetics to Digital Culture
KEYWORDS
Migratory Identity, Digital Presence,Analog-Digital Hybridity, Aesthetic Strategies, Technological Mediation
