“Louisa Martin draws a door to enter into the invisible: other knowledges, other affects, a different language. Inspiring and necessary!”
- Paul B. Preciado, Philosopher
"What fascinates me about Louisa Martin’s poetry is the way she lifts terms from science and engineering and twists them in ways that make us question the nature of selfhood and the self-making technologies that constitute the world today."
- Murray Shanahan, Professor of Cognitive Robotics at Imperial College London, and Senior Research Scientist at DeepMind
Neurodiversity seeks to embrace and de-pathologise people with uncommon perception and communication tendencies.
Disability Justice is a framework that examines disability and ableism with the understanding that able-bodied supremacy has been formed in relation to other systems of domination and exploitation.
Cognitive Justice advocates for the right of diverse forms of knowledge to co-exist, challenging the dominance of Western scientific paradigms and promoting epistemic pluralism.
Lossy Ecology seeks to contribute to the intentions of these frameworks by interrogating the universalist assumption that a single, factual reality exists, within which embodied differences such as ‘autism’ can be objectively defined and measured.
The term Lossy Ecology refers to the notion of a symbiotic permaculture of realities (compressions/filtered viewpoints) which can account for the multitude of embodied realities across humans, and beyond.
Lossy Ecology is also the title of:
• a book work
• a film work
• installation work of edge-lit signworks, sound and modified recording equipment
• a series of stage-based body-less performance works, with sound, sequenced stage lighting, and ‘impossible clothing’.
Lossy Ecology was conceived following two year-long residencies with Manos Tsakiris, Lab of Action and Body, Royal Holloway, and Anna Remington, Centre for Research into Autism and Education, UCL, London. Funded by a Welcome Trust Arts Award.
LOSSY ECOLOGY
[bookwork]
Lossy Ecology outlines artist Louisa Martin’s notion of an ‘ecosystem of realities’ in which bodies and experiences which resist static and dominant forms of representation, evolve their own means of self-definition.
Image works and a glossary of re-purposed terms are distributed among a series of commissioned texts and interviews drawing on a range of subjects including John Latham’s Flat Time, ’pataphysics, autistic perception, cognitive disability, the politics of visibility, and the neuroscience of embodiment, by Uma Breakdown, Sabel Gavaldon, Victoria Gray, Gareth Bell-Jones, John Latham, Louisa Shaeri (nee Martin), Anna Remington and Manos Tsakiris.
The texts collectively indicate a new approach to notions of ‘self’ or ‘body’ which might begin to account for bodies and embodied experiences that are not articulated in existing, standardised representational systems; a 'pataphysical body which transforms perceptual and representational voids into new possibilities.
Limited edition 500 copies.
LOSSY ECOLOGY , 2016
[film]
LOSSY ECOLOGY takes as its starting point a 1965 copy of LIFE magazine, and THIS article documenting the electro-shock "treatments" of autistic children including 9 year old Pamela. The film features contortionist Tommaso Di Vicenzo who enacts a contorted vision of Pamela’s internal experience. The film 'enters' the floral pattern in the her clothing, in a dissociative reconfiguration of the senses away from universalist interpretation.
Photo: Mark Blower
Technical Rehearsal of a Lossless Body, 2017
Sculptural and sound works.
Firs exhibited at a solo show, curated by Morgan Quaintance, at Cubitt, London, 2016, then group exhibition at ...at least a provisional way to settle in one place..., Komisario Berriak, Artium and Montehermoso, San Sebastian, Spain, with co-curator Sabel Gavaldon.
Dress Rehearsal for a Lossless Body, 2018
Live performance work commissioned by Fluent as part of Body Ecologies, in association with Centre Botín, Spain.
A body-less performance; a soundwork with live-operated stage lighting direct the attentional focus of the audience to transmit specific sensations and physiological states. A body consisting of pure mediation is transmitted into the body of the audience.
Interview with Mousse Magazine HERE