The Maternal, Digital Subjectivity, and the Aesthetics of Interruption

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Bringing together philosophies of the maternal with digital technology may appear to be an arbitrary pairing. However, reading them intertextually through select creative practices reveals how both encompass an aesthetics of interruption that becomes a novel means of understanding subjectivity. EL Putnam investigates how the digital performances of certain artists, creators, and technologists rupture existing representations of the maternal, taking advantage of the formal properties of digital media. What results are interruptions of visual and aural constructions through an immanent merging of the performing body with digital technologies. Putnam bases her analysis on close examinations of the way certain makers use the formal properties of digital imagery, such as the gap, the glitch, and the lag, as means of rendering images of the maternal uncanny in order to challenge mediation, constituting an aesthetics of interruption. The result is a radical critical strategy for engaging with digital technology and subsequent understandings of the subject that defy current modes of assimilation.

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EL Putnams The Maternal, Digital Subjectivity, and the Aesthetics of Interruption is a new direction in studies of the maternal and the visual, using digital and maternal philosophy to expand the definition of maternal subjectivities and ideologies. The strength of this book lies in the integration of politics, aesthetics, feminist maternal theory and digital forms of art making that subscribe to an aesthetic of interruption, pauses, immanence, and care giving. It will be an essential text for studies of the maternal and digital subjectivity and an important addition to the burgeoning bibliography on visual art and the maternal. * Jennie Klein, Professor of Art History, Ohio University, USA and Editor of The M Word: Real Mothers in Contemporary Art (2011) *
Thank you El Putnam for writing the book I needed to read right now. This is a timely and insightful contribution to the emergent and expanding field of studies in the maternal that will speak to many womxn, mothers, parents, and digital artists out there, as well as to those constantly being interrupted. And, though interruption is rightly positioned in this book as 'the norm for maternal subjectivity,' arguably, we all live in the age of interruption overload the aesthetics of interruption applying to every subject in the 21st Century. * Maria Chatzichristodoulou, Associate Dean of Research, Business, and Innovation, Kingston School of Art, UK *

Author Bio

EL Putnam lectures in Digital Media at the National University of Ireland Galway. She is a scholar and artist working predominately in performance art, video, sound, and interactive media. Her practice and research focuses on the interplay of corporeal and digital gestures.