Abstract (short paper)

Keywords: xenology, transgender, vegetariat, hormones, space art, bio art

It is becoming clearer that our attempts to separate nature from culture, humans from non-humans, ancient from modern, and life from technology have been a failure. Recognizing this failure allows us to weave back together what was inappropriately cleaved during the modernist project. To deal with this moment we can learn how to be xenologists, ones who study, analyze, and develop elements of the strange, the other, the alien. Here I show how xenological encounters across the domains of plants, transgender bodies, and space enable us to construct new forms of living within our entangled existences.

• Adriana Knouf (she/her/hers, sie/hir/hirs) works as a xenologist, as an artist-scientist-writer-designer-engineer. She engages with topics such as space art, satellites, radio transmission, non-human encounters, drone flight, queer and trans futurities, machine learning, the voice, and papermaking. She is the Founding Facilitator of the tranxxeno lab, a nomadic artistic research laboratory that promotes entanglements amongst entities trans and xeno. Adriana is also an Assistant Professor of Art and Design at Northeastern University, Boston, MA, USA. She is the author of How Noise Matters to Finance (2016) and numerous other journal articles, book chapters, and conference papers. She exhibits and presents her work internationally in festivals, conferences, and galleries. Adriana has a PhD in Information Science from Cornell University, an SM in Media Arts and Sciences from the Massachusetts Institute of Technology, and a BS in Engineering and Applied Science from the California Institute of Technology. tranxxenolab.net