N NOWACEK

As a white woman with the privileges of my whiteness and those of education and middle-class membership, I grew into an adulthood of 'work' defined by sitting at a table, thinking, and typing on a computer keyboard. For thirty years of my life, I lived in ignorance of my body, and all that it could do in the world. Again: the privilege of such a life; but also, the depression, and other chronic illnesses that became me. I found myself in a paradox of digital technology—and the absolute fruition of Descartian thinking—I had become only my thoughts, made possible by the information coming through my eyes, and going out through my fingers. The rest? Housing to keep my brain alive.

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Discovering my body, all of its potentials, and the relationship between physical strength and internal confidence, lead me to other bodies, and embodiment. I study bodies: aging bodies, working bodies, protesting bodies, walking bodies, and bodies coping with uncertainty. I explore the ways in which capitalism, the designed world, and the regulation of the natural environment choreograph and control daily life: the power and politics of the body in a globalized world with a changing climate.

The body is the first means to act and manipulate the world. Yet, embodied experience and physical encounter are increasingly dematerialized by smart devices, AI, and now pandemics: there is an increasing loss of connection to the physical world and one another. I address this loss of physical connection by making complex systems sense-able through embodied forms and experiences.