MAITE DE ORBE
OBLIQUE
Performance, text, code 
London, 2021
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EXTRACT: <<The following text accompanies the online performance piece 'Oblique' (de Orbe, 2021) where a piece of creative writing on a morning of period cramps and pills is life written and, in the process, being modified by a program as well as triggering the visualization of supporting media such as videos, images, and gifs. This piece is grounded on the concept of 'Situated Knowledges', coined by biologist and theorist Donna Haraway (Haraway, 2016) and aims to explore the ways in which essay writing and subjective experiences can be combined to give agency to non-objective and emotional kinds of expertise. To present the research that has supported the creation of this piece, I will use a Material Semiotics (Law, 2021) approach through which the key ideas will be introduced by case studies and stories. These come from a memory archive -memory understood as a storage system embedded in the RAM hardware of every entity, from insects to bodies scars, to pathways, to rocks, to pollution and so on. The RAM I am picking up the following data from is my head. The text you are about to read is a node. This node is a knot. It belongs to the imagining of a network of intertwined lines of RAMs. It is immaterial but comes from the pulling and amalgam of different theory, literary, and personal threads that give shape to a confused knot. This knot is like the one of your wired earplugs in a closed fabric compartment (pocket) where friction play roles as the matrix medium for interaction. These threads are not tightly pulled, but some are rather loose and already come in their own gnarls which certainly makes the process of weaving clumsy and in requirement of certain responsibility and attention. It is under these parameters that this piece has been created and this text written, under the philosophy of care.>>
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