Rebecca Close: Classic Gold Premium: The Wife of Them All
Classic Gold Premium / The Wife of Them All is a reading-performance of a speculative fiction story accompanied by sound and visuals.
Classic, Gold, Premium (CGP) is a net.art work: a tool to consider the forms of reproductive work elicited by the so-called ‘bioeconomy’ as it intersects with internet infrastructures. The CGP interface re-appropriates user data surveillance technologies (local storage) as a device to visualise the ‘value’ of user interaction in real time in terms of ‘bioeconomic work’, ‘affective capital’, ‘data’ and ‘the assisted reproduction of race’. CGP responds to research around Europe’s commercial assisted reproductive technology (ART) market.
The Wife of Them All is a short story based on personal experiences of networking and family-building in the context of data capitalism, restricted access to assisted reproductive technologies and the concomitant intensification of migratory control. The plot is organized around a ‘heist’ narrative in which the data extracted by data capitalist and bioeconomic platforms is re-appropriated and redistributed as visas and passports. This project dialogues with and pays homage to a lineage of cyberfeminist, blackfeminist, queer marxist and net.art works that have visibilised and appropriated reproductive work as a site of struggle, creativity, love and resistance.
Together the works experiment with different registers of technowriting: while CGP ‘publishes’ the labour it elicits and capital it produces in real-time (rehearsing the dynamics of a possible ‘just interface’), The Wife of Them All constructs through poetry and fiction an alternative to the dominant narratives of reproductive control.
Bio
Rebecca Close (b. U.K) is an artist, researcher and poet. Author of valid, virtual, vegetable reality (2018), a book that considers the relationship between technology, language and desire. They are a Kone Foundation funded Doctoral candidate in Art at Aalto University, Finland, with a dissertation on post-internet reproductive work. They are one-half of transfeminist and antiracist artistic research duo @criticaldías.