A conversation between Joseph Harrington and H. L. Hix
Joseph Harrington and H. L. Hix have perceived their work as being “in conversation” for quite some time, so the strength of their shared sense that Harrington’s recent Disapparitions and Hix’s Moral Tales were intent on listening in related ways led them to formalize their conversation. The result is the following inquiry into attention, attunement, genre, and other matters of writerly — and human — concern.
Joseph Harrington and H. L. Hix have perceived their work as being “in conversation” for quite some time, so the strength of their shared sense that Harrington’s recent Disapparitions and Hix’s Moral Tales were intent on listening in related ways led them to formalize their conversation. The result is the following inquiry into attention, attunement, genre, and other matters of writerly — and human — concern.
Guillermo Gómez-Peña: Poyesis genética and the Aztec ethno-cyborg
For decades, performance artist Guillermo Gómez-Peña has been curating an ongoing, serial “Ethno-Cyberpunk Trading Post,” a provocation with bio-poetic undercurrents. His phantasmagoric essays, poems, manifestoes, and theater pieces all offer up a mutant, cross-splicing take on race, just as his “genetically engineered Mexicans” and “ethno-cyborgs” use the language of bio-manipulation and robotics to undermine prefabricated notions of racial “belonging.” In such work, the human figure “enhanced with prosthetic implants” is a recurring trope for neocolonial incursions and resistance to such incursions at once. This is achieved by way of a Fourth-World “virtual barrio” of an ethnoscape trying to take back the rhetoric of “borderlessness” from the profiteering of the post-national, corporate world.
For decades, performance artist Guillermo Gómez-Peña has been curating an ongoing, serial “Ethno-Cyberpunk Trading Post,” a provocation with bio-poetic undercurrents.