Bethany Crawford ~ Keywords: pleasure, mediation, technics, modes of technical production, vibration, vibratory media, fuck healing (?), the human-technical relation

Bethany Crawford is an artist-researcher working with digital technologies to interrogate the shifting existential paradigms of the digital age within a framework of post-humanist theory, new materialism and traditional philosophy. She works from a protracted-body-assemblage of human and technics, collaborating with written words, camera and sound equipment, moving image, animation software and artificial intelligence, as a method to reflexively analyse the affective drives that compel technical production from the very nexus of the human-technical relation. Her current creative practice propositionally considers pleasure as an influential affective force with the potential to exceed and pervert the contemporary economic structures of technical production.

*

Bethany is currently a PhD candidate at the Amsterdam School of Cultural Analysis. She is a lecturer at the University of Amsterdam department of Media studies, and a tutor at Leiden University for the Social and Ecological Justice Activism in the Visual Arts minor. Bethany graduated from the University of Amsterdam with a Media Research Masters and holds a Masters of Art Praxis from the Dutch Art Institute. She obtained her bachelor’s degree in Moving Image from the University of Brighton.

*

She is a co-founder and the creative director of the Fuck Healing (?) collective. The collective implemented a summer program of events in 2023 titled “Fuck healing (?): The Insomniac Dreamers” at OT301 in Amsterdam, which was supported by Amsterdam Fonds der Kunst, Netherlands Institute of Cultural Analysis, Amsterdam School of Cultural Analysis and the Mondriaan Fonds.

*

Bethany’s creative research trajectory “Pleasuring Technics” is supported by the Mondriaan Fonds. Her book, Redefining Eternity: Interfacing Immortality in the Digital Corporate World was published in 2021 with the publishing house Academica Press. She was recently commissioned by Aalto University, Finland, to develop a curriculum and creative work in response to the “Data Vitality: Soft Infrastructures and Economies of Knowledge” programme.

*

Bethany’s research project ‘The evolutionary concrescence of Bethany Crawford” was supported by the Creative Europe I-Portunus scheme and has been exhibited in Berlin, Helsinki, Brighton, Amsterdam and Sardinia. Recent presentations of research include Fuck Healing (?): the Insomniac Dreamers at OT301, Fuck Healing(?): Living the Wounded Life at Treehouse NDSM,  Hotel Maria Kapel, Hoorn, The Netherlands and The Wonders of Possible, IX° LMDP International Festival of theatre art and new technologies, Kyberteatro, Italy. The Fuck Healing (?) Collective have a written contribution in the forthcoming publication Resistance, Activism and Health with the Oxford University Press and an additional text forthcoming in the edited collection Digital Exhaustion with Intellect publishers.