Elena Knox

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Elena Knox (Australia) – Radical Hospitality, 2014, 6:16
Today’s android hostess is a pre-security measure: a frontline that could, due to its cyborgian, networked status, alert its (puppet)masters to irregularities at the border. Institutionally, wherever a welcoming gesture or smiling rejection is called for, a female figure is usually procured. ‘Radical Hospitality’ understands this performance of hostile hospitality as occurring most profoundly at borders to nation-states, where hostesses stand signify international (in)hospitality – baldly, who is admitted and who is refused entry. The artwork exposes the figure as a marker of separatism: a gatekeeper for multi-national reluctance to behave in an unconditionally hospitable way to refugees and the poor.

Elena Knox
Elena Knox is a media and performance artist. Currently a postdoctoral research fellow in Intermedia Art and Science at Waseda University, Tokyo, she is an affiliate of the Creative Robotics Lab at Australia’s National Institute for Experimental Arts, and co-directs production house Lull Studios. Her PhD Media Art (UNSW Australia) wonthe 2015 Dean’s Award (Art & Design) and investigated the ethics and aesthetics of the likely sex and companionship work of gynoid robots. Knox’s artworks have been presented in premiere venues in New York, Wisconsin, Berlin, Athens, Hong Kong, Plovdiv, Frankfurt, Milan, Aberystwyth, London, Tokyo, Sydney, Melbourne and Cairo.