What comes after the binary codes of the first waves of digital diffusion? This presentation mobilizes and disentangles multiple meanings of the phrase “binary code” to speculate on answers to this question. Binary code is the basis of digital data. Binary code is also, as mobilized here, a theoretical tool that indexes the infinite series of semiotic doubles – including networked/non-networked, male/female,  developed/underdeveloped, citizen/migrant – that haunt contemporary digital life. Remixing previously inscribed social categories of race, gender, and class, these doubles appear in new “innovative” forms of digital products that reproduce hierarchies of knowledge. In the frictions of globalized flows, artists and social activists in diverse communities and regions are refusing the digital re-constructions of these binaries, and both imagining and making techno-social spaces beyond these codes. Seen through critical race, gender, and visual studies, we will discuss how digital artists and activists, such as Cao Fei (China), Michelle Dizon (Phillipines/USA), the Raqs Media Collective (India), El Churo Comunicación (Ecuador), as well as my own collective project, The Institute of (Im)Possible Subjects, are producing social and technological critiques and pluralizing subjectivities and networks - beyond binary codes.  

Dalida María Benfield is an artist, researcher, and educator. She produces video, installations, archives, artists’ books, workshops, and other pedagogical and communicative actions across online and offline platforms and most often, collectively. Her research and artistic practices are experimental, participatory, and iterative, imagining and making media and social forms in their process. Her writing projects, engaging the transformations that artists produce in techno-social spheres, are culminating in a current book-length manuscript, Beyond Binary Code. Benfield has co-founded several autonomous media and research networks, and is the co-founder of the transnational feminist platform, The Institute of (Im)Possible Subjects. She is also a co-founder of Video Machete, working with LGBTQ, recent immigrant, and youth of color. Her single-channel video and digital media installations have been exhibited at DOKK1, Aarhus, Denmark; Huret & Spector Gallery, Emerson College; Espacio Parqueadero, Bogotá, Colombia; Centre PHAKT, Rennes, France; Festival Internacional del Nuevo Cine Latinoamericano, Havana, Cuba; Fredric Jameson Gallery, Duke University; GASP Projects, Boston; and the New Museum of Contemporary Art, New York. She is currently a Visiting Researcher at the Future Making space at Aarhus University, Denmark, and Faculty at the Vermont College of Fine Arts. Previously, she was a Fellow and Faculty Associate at the Berkman Center for Internet and Society at Harvard University, and a Chancellor's Fellow at the University of California-Berkeley. Benfield holds an M.F.A. from the School of the Art Institute of Chicago and an M.A. and Ph.D. from the University of California-Berkeley.