An illustrated examination of Donald Rodney’s seminal digital media work Autoicon (1997–2000).
Donald Rodney''s Autoicon, a work originally produced as both a website and CD-ROM, was conceived by the artist in the mid-1990s but not completed until two years after his death in 1998. Referencing Jeremy Bentham’s infamous nineteenth-century "Auto-Icon," the work proposes an extension of the personhood and presence of Rodney, while critically challenging dominant conceptions of the self, the body, and historicity. Grounded in a partial collection of medical documents that constitute biomedicine’s attempts to comprehensively "know" and maintain Rodney’s body during his lifelong experience of sickle-cell aneamia, Autoicon pursues the artist’s address, from the mid-1980s onward, of the British social and institutional body’s cellular composition through racialized, biopolitical power.
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