Chariklia Martalas

Chariklia Martalas is both a writer and a philosopher. She has a Masters degree in Philosophy with distinction from the University of the Witwatersrand (2022), a second masters degree in MSC Intermediality: Film, Literature and the Arts in Dialogue at the University of Edinburgh (2023). Her most recent academic publication is Authentic Expression and the Cyborg Relation: An Approach to Engaging with Computer-generative Art in the Balkan Journal of Philosophy (Vol 15 Issue 1 2023).

In 2021 Chariklia contributed four pieces of writing to the book A South African Convivio with Dante published by Florence University Press as well as winning the University of the Witwatersrand’s creative writing prize, The Deon Hofmeyr Prize. In 2022 her monologue was chosen to be performed at the Market Theatre for their 46th Anniversary celebrations, celebrating young writers. Chariklia's play A Long Walk to Purgatory, was part of a dual project of publication and performance. It was published in 2023 by the University of Johannesburg  Press and was performed with the Johannesburg School of Mask and Movement in Pretoria, Johannesburg, Durban and Cape Town A Long Walk to Purgatory was an adaptation of Dante's Divine Comedy (Inferno and Purgatory) to the South African Context. The project was funded by  The Italian Embassy in Pretoria, The General Consulate of Italy in Johannesburg, the Consulate of Italy in Cape Town, the Italian Institute of Culture in Pretoria and the Dante Alighieri Society of Rome.

Research

My main research areas and creative practices are grounded on the foundation of post-human thought as well as questions surrounding media, creative expression, knowledge production as well as ideas surrounding memory, our relationship to the past, history, all refracted through a post-human lens and expressed with an intermedial methodology.

My theoretical research and my creative practices are becoming more intertwined.

My first master's was in philosophy. I wrote was on computer generative art. Before I even started researching thoroughly post-humanism, I was clearly leaning towards it because my master's thesis is the idea that to see computer generative art as either being created by the computer or created by the human is to misunderstand that it's actually a work of art produced by a cyborg relation. It's the intertwining of both human and computer creative capacities. It was this that was the beginning that started making me think about looking at AI and human relationships and how they could be seen not in terms of antagonisms but rather as a new form of expression. This was further explored when I published _Authentic Expression and the Cyborg Relation_ in the Balkan Journal of Philosophy, where I took my master's work and then went further with it by saying that the authentic expression of computer generative art is not the art itself, it's the process behind it.

It shows something that is very intrinsic to human life is our need to engage with technology as a way of extending ourselves into the world. My second master's was at the University of Edinburgh and it was a master's in intermediality which looks at the intersection between different media. Here I did a practice-based project instead of a dissertation. My practice-based project ultimately was a hypertext. It included audio clippings and common boxes that were their own text sort of interwoven as well as a hyperlinked network. The work is called _The Inventor Decides to Die_, and is an exploration of the necessity of death for life through a dialogues between an inventor and her robot. and instrumental to those ideas were Rosie Bedroite's chapter on death in her book The Post-Human.

What The Inventor Decides to Die ultimately showed me was the potential that comes with what Zylinska and Kember calls creating critical yet creative media. By having to express posthumanist theories of death and transhumanist theories of death in a creative way, I became immered in the ideas. It challenged me to make sure that I truly understood what I was thinking about and had to really focus on what it meant for translation. In terms of methodologies, I find intermediality to be a very radical space because it is a creative methodology that is fundamentally posthumanist because it's all about the relations between different media and seeing how they can become intertwined to form new configurations of expression. It's also very largely connected to how we experience media today. We just go on our phones and our phones are a hypermedium. We don't really experience text and image and sound in isolation anymore. The possibilities of intermedial forms of expression is a powerful mirroring to our ordinary experiences of media and so the possibilities for an even greater accessibility.

So, now where I'm at in terms of my research areas, is that I want to continue to explore how to create post-humanist works of an intermedial nature. For instance, I have handed in a play to a theatre where I have adapted Khoisan folktales to a futuristic post-human South African context. It is projects that aims to challenge a South African time focused on the present and Apartheid in order to rethink how we engage with the past and the future as time that isn't linearly separated from the present but interwoven with the present.

This is also linked to what I'm currently researching for PhD applications — the idea of post-human memory, which hasn't been concretely theorised in the literature. For me, memory is a very exciting space at the moment because with a saturation of media, the power of our digital archives, we are starting to find that memory is going to be something unavoidable while also being something fundamentally interactive and manipulatable. I wish to think about what our memory is going to look like in the future and whether going to meet the challenges of an exponential technological advancement in the Anthropocene. Because so much of our ways of identifying ourselves and determining our actions in the world is based on memory. And so, ultimately, I'm very interested in looking at the way we remember, _how_ we remember. Because what it seems to me is that our humanist ways of experiencing the world are so entrenched that we ultimately remember in a humanist way.

I believe I am in an exciting place Where ForeignObjekt and the post-human art lab and all the other online spaces , is so exciting for me is that it acknowledges the revolutionary potential that exists between theory and practice and allows for that exploration as a means of breaking ideas that philosophy belongs n a university classroom. I find the space fulfilling because it is about both being creative and imaginative while also being systematic and rigorous in terms of what these new concepts could be and what our new relationships could be to our human selves and all nonhumans. How do we start looking at technology as a partnership, instead of something that's going to make us extinct versus something that's expendable. How do we start seeing the earth as having her own stories? Material ecocriticism is, I think, a very important theory because meaning isn't the sole prerogative of humans.