Thesis Defence: Jessica Hanzelkova

This thesis assembles within it a glimpse of ‘a life’. It traces a path of disillusion to dissolution, in navigating a search for identity in an increasingly globalized world. It is an exceptionally personal journey.

Settling into a trajectory carved by posthumanism, the thesis finds a steady muse in the twenty-first century as a temporal conception and paradigmatic tipping point. More specifically, it has allowed me to channel the embodied liminality I have felt during this time, as a woman, a digital native, and a perceived other, through a series of devices affixed within the space of the head – The Artifacts of No-Place. In disrupting identification and playing with the boundaries of the body each artifact has lent itself to different performances, different means of liberation, concealment, and spectacle. This grounds an otherwise disembodied speculation on disillusion and dissolution, within a process of making. The following document captures a methodology of serious play undertaken in this thesis. It assembles lengthy fragments of thought that navigate struggles with otherness, home, and difference, adjacent to visual encounters, headline clippings, and embodied narratives. This is done to mirror my own understanding of belonging, as it morphed to accept processes of becoming. By assembling these seemingly disparate elements I interrogate boundaries imposed and propagated in society, by mapping a meandering route towards a posthuman and nomadic sensibility.

Scrolling endlessly, scaling rapidly, we dissolve and reform within global movements of information, energy, and ideas.