Shapeshifting the Colonial Object

The idea of shapeshifting is present in the oldest forms of totemism and shamanism and in extant literature and represents our desire to create new forms. Drawing on Southwest Native American philosophy, indigenous design and postcolonial theory, this thesis examines the signifier of the shapeshifter as symbolic metaphor to create techno-hybrid forms. Shapeshifting reformation aims to understand and develop new visual languages through the lenses of artificial life, postcolonialism and otherness. Analysis of emergent forms is employed through sculpture and automata, system aesthetics and real-time systems, leading to an imaginative paradigm shift in relation to forms enforced by colonial conversion. Thus, this paper will further examine the construction of social and scientific discourses about power that initially authorized colonial violence and continue to support repressive policies against indigenous species. It argues that as the previously stable ordering divisions of Life and Nonlife shake, new figures, tactics and discourses of power can emerge through hybrids. These concepts will be discussed in selected works from 2016–2018—The Desert, The Animist, and The Virus; Reformation of 50,000 Letters; Material Reiteration; and Data Weaving as Activism—using indigenous processes combined with computation to refigure and reimagine colonized objects.

The Desert, The Animist, and The Virus, sculpture and automata, 2018. (© Sarah Rosalena Brady. Photo: Serge Hoeltschi.)