The notion of trajectories of information, as I propose both as a theoretical tool and through my artwork, materializes the fluidity of matter and material bodies, such as humans, and it’s performativity in our interactions and experiences. Conceptualizing the formation of matter as a never-ending series of trajectories of information rather than as already formed and stabilized agents helps me bring into question the strictness and rigidity of Western scientific epistemologies. Grounding my work on contemporary theories from social, natural and political sciences, as well as on non-western perspectives, I wish to actualize the Western glossary and lexicology around the formation of natural phenomena. As an artist from both Western and non-western backgrounds, I feel that bridging the gap between those mind frames is an urgent matter. A trajectory of information is a temporal and complex stabilization of matter (Zylinska, 2014). It is not static, and therefore it is not stable. It is matter constantly shapeshifting to exist in an unstable universe. Trajectories are defined by their interactions (Butler, 1988), and intra-actions (Barad, 2007), their reaction to natural forces and their own, intrinsic, mysterious self-acknowledgements (Morton, 2019). Trajectories do not fit into any category of Western science, but they traverse all of them, they are at the same time mineral, organic, self-replicating, stellar, gas, animal, and ocean. Once matter is expected to exist only within taxonomies and categories, these become a tool to oppress, exclude, mistreat, and a struggle to eradicate everything outside of them, and this is dangerous for life itself.
With trajectories of information, all Western taxonomies and classifications cease to exist because matter, and bodies, start existing in the exact temporality, in which they are active (Irigaray & Marder, 2016). They exist in their momentary and local intra-actions and self-acknowledgements, and not in the hypothetical drawers they are expected to fit in according to Western science, indefinitely, from the day they are born until the day they die. The results of these exchanges are often artistic pieces, but also research papers, as well as material, theoretical and aesthetic experimentation. They combine the knowledge I have collected on the different frontiers that I inhabit. They also carry my personal experience and political statements, targeting my experiences with health, queerness, diaspora life, among others.
The proposal of trajectories of information allows me to debunk, dis-organize, and re-shape Western taxonomies and categories that deny the freedom of matter to exist in its pure, chaotic, and complex way (Maldonado, 2020). The shapeshifting properties of matter are a proof of its anarchist (Goldman, 2016, Bookchin, 2022), self-organized and autopoietic (Maturana & Varela, 2012), decentralized (Zhen, 2020), queer and undisciplined (Preciado, 2019, Galindo, 2022) existence. I argue that it is due to its shapeshifting capacity, that matter and bodies survive and exist in unstable ecological, social and political times (Morton, 2019) without any judgement, stratification, or closed taxonomy (Bookchin, 2022). Rather, matter exists in collaborative and symbiotic networks (Margulis, 1998), desires (Goldman, 2016), and temporary and spacial self-acknowledgements (Butler, 2014). The theory of trajectories of information is proposed as speculative fiction (Haraway 2020, Le Guin & Haraway, 2020) rooted both in Western scientific knowledge, and in other non-western knowledge systems. Fiction enables this theory to be presented not solely as a research result, but also in the form of poems, performative actions, drawings, collections, among others. These creative methods are a tool to critically engage with and re-shape Western systems of knowledge production, due to their open characteristics and non-academic languages, acknowledging sensible processes and practices, poetical, personal, and esthetical approximations to nature as valid tools for its comprehension. By adding aesthetics to closed systems, or, in other terms, by adding degrees of freedom (Maldonado & Mezza-García, 2016) to a close system, such as Western science, the system gains complexity: “Societies witness an increase in the degrees of freedom—which, by and large, is a positive feature—whilst experiencing transitions away from hierarchical control (Bar-Yam, 2019). This means that, increasingly, the world is becoming more and more unpredictable—at least by the means of the traditional models of classical science.” (Maldonado & Mezza-García, 2016:52), the system then approaches what life actually is: a system that only exists far from equilibrium, far from the classifications that Western knowledge has constructed for it.
