This thesis explores the intersection of art, automatism, belief and machine learning, probing the nuanced relationship between artists and generative algorithms as tools for creating imagery and text. A historical connection is drawn between contemporary machine-assisted image generation and early spiritualistic automatic generative practices, such as automatic writing and drawing, used to communicate with entities beyond the self. The thesis investigates how such practices have evolved over time, highlighting the design and commodification of the planchette, a tool once used for automatic drawing and spiritual communication, which led to the birth of the Ouija board.

These tools of automation are posed as prototypes for the newer interfaces of virtualized communication, such as the mouse and keyboard. This suggests that contemporary devices which are used to navigate digital space have a direct lineage to designs which invite automatic interaction. The thesis extends this historical exploration into the domain of net.art, identifying parallels between the surfing practices of the first digital artist groups, and both Western Spiritualist Automatism and the artist games of the early Avant-garde.

Circular Metafictions: what remains unbound is gathered is a hybrid-documentary that conceptualizes a trace from the Middle Passage toward biographical historiography to examine nuanced portraits of ordinary black life. I introduce my developing concept, Black Noetic Theory (BNT) to consider how blackness, interiority and performance are embedded in modes of production, for which to imagine black existence otherwise in audiovisual space. The thesis is divided into three parts to reflect upon the relationships between black life, the incoherencies of black life and artistic production. Part one, situates colonial history and resulting fragmentation. Part two, explores the Henrietta Marie slave ship and speculating a maternal origin. Part three, observes personal history to locate continuities between the spirit and physical worlds.

Ch'ik'xulub: A Non-Visible Crater is an installation based on a fictive story about a scientist from the 1960's who is studying the connection of Earth to the Universe through ancient Mayan science and history. The story is inspired on my grandparent's archive and my research on the Chicxulub asteroid’s impact. This work creates a dialogue between the heterogenous as life/death, macro/micro, organic/inorganic, Yucatan/Baja California peninsulas and real/unreal facts.

Ch'ik'xulub:A Non-Visible Crater brings together time through geological, cultural, and biographical memories with videomicrography, archive, objects, sound, sculpture, and a collaborative piece of embroideries.

The story began with me visiting cenotes (caves with water) to abstract fragments of the sites as soil, water, and invisible microorganisms, then photomicrographing them to make an embroidered cartography in collaboration with Mayan women from La Hermita at Oxkutzcab Yucatan.

Everything changed when I dreamed of my posthumous grandfather, who was a scientist. He started sending me his super 8 reels from La Hermita. I wrote him letters and he responded; through this series of fictive correspondence we go back to the Mayan mythologies and sociocultural history along with other contemporary issues. My grandfather and I are thinking about what our real home is? We know that we belong to the specific place where were conceived because everything is connected; therefore, the site is merged into the dynamic of engendering. We connected this idea to the fact that my daughter recognized as home the rock where she was conceived. Our potential homes are in different states of Mexico; Yucatan and Tamaulipas (both lands affected by the Chicxulub asteroid impact). In my fiction I connect Baja California to this macro cosmical event because of the constant movements of Earth's plate tectonics.

The Promise of Meaning develops the general conceptual and theoretical dimensions of my practice and its application to the accompanying thesis exhibition, Girls’ Last Tour. Broadly, the essay is an examination of consumption and the commodity as they appear under capitalism and the manner in which these concepts and their consequences affect our ability to generate meaning. The essay begins with an analysis of the processes and consequences of capitalism and commodification as described by Karl Marx and developed in subsequent secondary literature. Following this, the concept of allegory is developed within a framework indebted to Walter Benjamin and Susan Buck-Morss. It is demonstrated that allegory and the processes of commodification share a similar capacity in regard to the generation and dissolution of meaning. The consequences of this are developed in the subsequent section with respect to our individual capacity to create meaning under the conditions of capitalism. The role of choice and the concept of the ready-made are analyzed as a means of production or authorship given these conditions. The following section considers the role of digital media in relation to our ongoing concerns regarding the generation and dissolution of meaning. The concept of selection is developed as a strategy of generating meaning specific to our digital moment and the overabundance of information. The essay concludes by offering the concept of salvage as a strategy of creative production in our present world followed by a description and analysis of the installation, Girls’ Last Tour.

This text is presented in tandem with America’s Harvest Box, an exhibition showcasing a series of cooking videos that reveal the violent histories behind celebrated culinary delights. These histories are a direct result of aggressive United States military occupation both overseas and at home.

Chapter one of this work shares an excerpt from a piece of writing about the artist’s family tales, an archive of oral traditions that build her family’s collective story. It deals with the construction of narratives and truth, and the haunting nature of histories that cannot be told.

Chapter two of this thesis paper grapples more directly with issues of consent, violence, and consumption. It includes more referential information regarding the histories of the food items addressed within the artist’s cooking videos, as well as deeper analysis of present-day systems of blood sacrifice and colonial control. This chapter also includes personal stories that contextualize the relationships between individual and collective trauma.

Through juxtaposing prose, poetry, and a screenplay, I aim to investigate familial, romantic, and sexual intimacy through the lens of trans femininity. Personal and critical essays examine contemporary art, image theory, and popular culture examine the ways in which the transsexual self is created through self-fashioning and matrilineal impulses, both familial and chosen. The collection of writing critically analyzes the development and consumption of the “manic tranny dream girl” archetype and reframes trans desire through a transfeminine lens. Theory and autobiography are used interchangeably here as I seek not to produce my own theory, but rather to engage in a critical self-analysis through the process of art making that extends into a broader conversation about trans bodies in contemporary media.