Western Vocal Drag and the Cyborg’s Prosody: Decolonizing Assistive Audio Technology2 min read

Elia Vargas

Signals Podcast 1: A conversation with Dorothy R. Santos

  • Which voices do assistive audio technologies normalize, and which do they marginalize? What effects does this have on cultural identity?
  • What role can the open source software community play in assistive technologies?
  • How can creative inquiry function as a meaningful intervention into the ideologies inherent to the technological development process?

The inaugural Signals podcast features an in-depth conversation with Filipino American storyteller, poet, artist, and scholar Dorothy R. Santos. Santos, a San Francisco native, is the recent recipient of the 2022 Mozilla Creative Media award for her interactive, documentary-poetic work, The Cyborg’s Prosody and the inaugural YBCA 10 Award in 2021. She is currently a Eugene V. Cota-Robles fellow in the Film and Digital Media PhD program at University of California, Santa Cruz. Her artwork has been exhibited at Ars Electonrica, Rewrite Festival, Yerba Buena Center for the Arts, and more. Her writing appears in art21, Art in America, Ars Technica, Hyperallergic, Rhizome, and Vice Motherboard. She is the Executive Director of the Processing Foundation.

As a steward of arts and technology in the San Francisco Bay Area and a scholar of feminist techno sciences and critical medical anthropology, Santos’s work is prolific and influential across multiple fields. The podcast conversation ranges from her interactive fiction Domain Errors, published by Art Journal to The Cyborg’s Prosody, to assistive auditory technologies, open source software, and her work at the Processing Foundation. In Domain Errors, Santos quotes Lucia Sommer’s essay “In/Visible Body: Notes on Biotechnologies Vision,” who asks: “How does the body, that most vulnerable of territories, fare in the relentless expansion of the sight machine?” Listen to this month’s Signals podcast, hosted by Elia Vargas for a conversation on this and other questions, such as: What is the Cyborg’s Prosody? What role can the open source software community play in assistive technologies? How are technocultures and spell work related? And, is there a place for forgetting in the future?

Listen to Santos’s award winning docu-poetics project, Pulse, here:

Podcast Music Credits: systemritual (Elia Vargas and Nathan Blaz)

Image Credit: Emma Chiang

Dr. Elia Vargas is an artist and scholar working across multiple mediums, ranging from video and sound to writing and performance. His work is critical, speculative, ecological, energetic, and technocultural. It is engaged in an interdisciplinary approach with contemporary and historical experimental media, digital cultural, and feminist science studies. Vargas collaborates widely with artists, musicians, and institutions. He holds a PhD from UC Santa Cruz. He is currently a lecturer at CSU Monterey Bay and is co-founder of the SF Bay Area art and technology organization, the Living Room Light Exchange.