Kimberley Bianca is a PhD candidate in Emergent Technologies and Media Arts Practices at The University of Colorado Boulder in the US. Her practice-based research includes community-based design and participatory performance. In 2019, she completed her master’s thesis “Innovating Electrofringe: A Distributed Curatorial Platform for Electronic Art” at The University of New South Wales in Australia while directing the arts organisation and festival, Electrofringe. She has a BSc in Art and Technology from Saxion University in the Netherlands, where she co-developed the software-based public art project “KaleidOk: Visually Communicating Emotions from Spoken Word”. Before academia, Kimberley freelanced in video production, participatory art, and workshop programs.

Disaster Girl

How I Learned To Stop Worrying And Love The Pandemic

This paper situates the author’s performance art practice, Disaster Girl, in the theoretical lens of ecomaterialism to analyse media art and praxis. Disaster Girl challenges audiences with remix, bricolage, and collaborative modes by confronting dystopia by juxtaposing political satire and environmental exigency. Three recent Disaster Girl projects, ranging from the written to the performative, are reviewed: A Camouflage Opera (2019), based on Kurtág: József Attila Fragments with soprano Judit Molnar; Bile for Bog Roll (2020), an audiovisual site-specific poetry performance; and Murphy’s Law Or: (2020), a participatory archive and networked performance. These examples help examine authorship, agency, and control through Guattarian ‘ecosophy’, the cyclical nature of interrelated ecologies and anthropogenic degradation, and Anne Carson’s ‘circular reasoning’, emotion and disorder becoming a self-fulfilling prophecy. Thus, Disaster Girl engages with relational, social, emotional, and material assemblages within the poetic realm.

Keywords: performance poetry; ecomaterialism; Capitalocene