As an artist working with tele-nomadic multimedia, I work with video, performance and installation, experimenting with technology as a means to channel transmissions of memory and knowledge from the ether-nets of my mixed diasporic background. Born and raised in the United States to Chinese-Peruvian parents, I concern myself with the intergenerational passage and overloading of information. Using video technology and interactive installations, I explore the performative fissures between language, distance, time and mobility. Through a process of mirrored, closed-circuit and analog connections, I arrange malfunctioning screens and map out wires into a precarious transnational array of looping communication. I also sculpt, edit and perform with archival materials (from hand-polished stone to digitized photos and sounds of my family) to contemplate the haptic, intimate and familial bonds we have to mobile devices. Fragmenting the links we hold dear to contemporary consumer electronics, I conceptualize the liminal capacity of technology to possess and display the cognitive afterlife of migratory human and object dementia. While the televisual work of Nam June Paik and Dieter Kiessling motivate me to consider the systematic operations of the medium, my passion to integrate ethnographic and intergenerational information derives from my research of Trinh T. Minh-ha, Rea Tajiri and Song Dong’s work. With the constant travel of light and signals in my practice, I see the techno-transference of memory as a non-linear process that offers a gateway to feel closer to the aura of loss in an age of pixelated preservation. www.dianartist.com / www.vimeo.com/artdianali
