Alter

With Alter, I attempt to raises awareness of the proliferation of endocrine disruptors—compounds that interfere with sex hormones—in the environment. Alter displays a frog that has been exposed to Atrazine, a herbicide commonly used by American agricultural corporations. Atrazine is a dangerous endocrine disruptor common in the food supply, and it altered the hormone levels in this frog to make it classifiable as “intersex.” Alter highlights the hypocrisy of a corporate system that uses chemicals known to disrupt hormones associated with gender expression, when individuals in those same organizations often espouse right-wing ideologies upholding rigid gender norms by displaying both the nonhuman and the anthropocentric product within the confines of an inverted cross. Frogs are indicator species, meaning they manifest effects of toxic contamination. Thus Alter speculates on a possible future, alerting the audience to potentially profound effects wrought on the body by corporate interests. By using an indicator species to highlight the effects of human activity on the nonhuman, in this case through mutation, I am looking into a speculative future where the profit-centric ideology of the American right operates in opposition to the “traditional” values they espouse. Mutation towards an “intersex” human future, in my speculative imagining, is the result of this internally oppositional ideology.

Alter ultimately speculates on a future where co-creation occurs by the interjection of profit-oriented ideals into ecosystems, and, through a twist of irony, a landscape emerges where hybridity and gender nonconformity (in the sense of middle-American politics) are the mainstream modes of identification. An "intersex" future.