The Embodied and Entangled Symject: Becoming-with More-than-Human, Geopolitical Landscapes Through Artistic Practice Using Image-Based Technology

This paper is a feminist, posthumanist exploration of subjectivity, through an artistic practice developed in response to embodied encounters with geo-political sites of extraction. Contextualised in a time of ecological breakdown, the artist’s encounters with more-than-human worlds are digitally fragmented and reconstituted as artwork and as a transformative material reckoning; reconceptualising the human subject as symject through photography, 3D mapping, video, sculpture and sound. Symjectivity as a new term accurately describes the porosity of human and non-human intra-actions, and this condition of entanglement is materially considered through the expanded imagery developed through this practice-based research. As a result, this paper posits that reclaiming the word subjectivity through creative practice in this way works to reshape how we consider ourselves as earthly subjects; as the artist-as-symject through the works discussed is caught in an affirmative, psychological process of rejecting individualism, moving towards posthuman entanglements with the more-than-human. This artistic research contributes to an active process of earthbound solidarity in a time of crisis, materialising feminist imaginaries through the expanded photographic image.