Ameera Kawash

I use nested intimacies to explore embodiment, datafication, trauma, and digital wellbeing. As a methodology this helps bring sites of intimacy into my research, and vice versa, as well as explore techno-ontological imbrications of inside and outside.

Nesting can be neutral, beneficial, contested, parasitic, or traumatic. It can include human, nonhuman, and other-than-human agencies. Drawing from an analogy to hyperparasitism used by Benjamin Bratton to describe users embedded within other users, I try to apply this model towards auto-ethnographic reflection and visual art practice. Nesting evokes both the sense of preparing an embodied ground for oneself and an embedded and technical harvesting of different forms of information into one another. Nested intimacies becomes a way of conducting research and practice in a space of vulnerability and openness, while intimacy reaches beyond the ‘I’ as a biographical container.