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Saggi per la call-sezione sottoposta a peer review

Nr. 10 (2025): Miscellanea III

Cyborgs and Core Dump: Disrupting Recursive Colonialism through the Work of François Knoetze

DOI
https://doi.org/10.54103/connessioni/30141
Eingereicht
November 13, 2025
Veröffentlicht
2026-01-15

Abstract

The paper offers a critical reading of François Knoetze’s audiovisual work Core Dump (2018–2019) as an aesthetic device that interrogates the colonial and racial genealogies underpinning the modern technological imaginary. Structured into four chapters situated along the global supply chain of technological production, Core Dump unsettles the presumed linearity of progress and, through the computational metaphor of the core dump, activates a reflection on alternative “restore points” from which colonial temporality might be reconfigured. Drawing on the Critical Computation Bureau’s notion of “recursive colonialism” (2021), the paper shows how Core Dump constructs a colonial genealogy of the machine, inscribing the racialized Black body at the very core of modern technicity and challenging the servo-instrumental rationality that grounds modern epistemology in its technical articulation (Atanasoski and Vora 2019). Through an analysis of the cyborg figures emerging across the videos, the article highlights the ways in which the work subverts the master/slave relation and imagines unsettling alliances between racialized subjectivities and technical objects. Knoetze’s technopoetics thus destabilizes the recursive structure of modern racial epistemology and operates as a prefiguration of postcolonial technological futures–futures in which the toxicity and material waste of technological modernity are transformed into possibilities for liberation and for a renewed conceptualization of the human.

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