Black and white photograph of the head and shoulders of Daniel Joseph Martinez

Daniel Joseph Martinez

Abigail Cohen Rome Prize
September 6, 2021–February 7, 2022
Profession
Donald Bren Professor of Art, Department of Art, University of California, Irvine
Project title
Forum Romanum of Dissent or To See The World Without Time
Project description

Undertaken as a means to define the twenty-first-century concept of identity by examining science fiction and the 1970s Italian autonomous movement in such a way to re-imagine the political future. In an era marked by the major transition away from existing party structures towards mass anti-authoritarianism, the beginnings of Autonomic bear some resemblance to current dissent movements emerging now in reaction to similarly fascist, desperate, and unsettling times. Structured as both a first-hand document and a contemporaneous analysis of the innovative post-’68 radical Autonomic movement viewed though the twenty-first century. In both narrative and overview to the movement’s theoretical underpinnings to build autonomous spaces outside of capitalism. This project looks to three intertwining ideas: (1) the coexistence of post humans with creations of their own that appear as interdimensional space; (2) the twin desires of the fetishization and power of the post-representational subject; and (3) how and when humans recognize they are unable to survive the regime of transactional spectacle culture and spectacle’s counterpoint, subjection, surveillance, and control. I will be conducting a series of experiments taking into account the geopolitical structure of the landscape. Most notably, how the body functions in dialectical space. To mutate and reimagine my flesh as an augmented reality situated in historical Roman architectural past and present. In negotiating the time-space continuum (worm Holes) the question of EMPIRE is a postmortem examination as well as an indictment of humanity. The proposed derive/intervention represents a mode of antireality.