queer

What happens at the edges of bordercrossing technologies? Our poster showcases an exploratory, Benjaminian digital experiment that queers the investigation into who and what and how emerging technologies connect with our bodies, lives and desires. This work is part of a larger project investigating tools, platforms and digital strategies that help us to weave together the digital and the analogue, human and machine, and interactivity that moves us beyond linearity to multiplicity, and for ELO we are excited to highlighting our proposed experimental project archive, still in the early stages of development as we are considering multiple platforms and seeking feedback. We’re building a kind of queer digital arcades - both platform and method - weaving together poetry, elit, theory and ephemera to perform an interactive, technoerotic story that troubles the borders between technologies, selves, others and the world. Our goal is to offer de-centred and multiple entry points to explore the increasingly ubiquitous technologies that summon our curiosities, vulnerabilities and penetrability, and implicate our skin, our memories of the basement bar, and our bravery. This multivocal work includes both poetic and analytical texts, electronic literature and theory as we work to visually and associatively map a series of technologies and concepts into constellations and queer formations. We understand and use the term “queer” methodologically – that is, we believe that queerness is a way of doing, whether that doing is in the production, consumption, or circulation of digital forms. The queerness here is in the very structure of the interface, the affordances of the platform, the non-linear, expansive, and associative logics that are revealed through exploration. The result is aspirational as much as, or more than, it is analytic, prompting users to imagine new speculative queer worlds as we all grapple with the ones we currently inhabit. The larger project aims to literalize the circuit formed by the digital and the queer, thus representing an emerging, heterogenous interactivity that produces radical possibilities, possibilities that we call edge effects. Our Benjaminian digital arcade aims both to capture and perform some of these edge effects and will include new electronic writing alongside experiments in spatial theorymaking. We are considering a variety of platforms at this time, including: 1) VR Chat; 2) an emerging beta platform for webvr and 3) Unity. We anticipate having screen captures of prototypes across multiple platforms and perhaps active links to beta worlds to share at the time of the conference.

Despite the burgeoning interest in the creation of imaginative spaces in AR and VR, very little focus has been given to sound. This paper borrows aspects of cinema studies and cultural geography to argue that sound can create a discursive environment and a queer space in Augmented Reality (AR). Referring to Michel Chion’s Audio-vision (1990), and Steven Shaviro’s Post-cinematic affect (2010), I explore how the assemblage of aural, visual and haptic in AR pieces, such as Caitlin Fisher’s ‘Chez moi’ (2014), create what Lev Manovich (2001) calls ‘hybrid spaces’, spaces visually disjointed but semantically connected. In ‘Chez moi’, Fisher invites the viewer to put on their headphones and watch the video on their smartphone while walking down Hayden street in Toronto, where the lesbian bar Chez moi was located when Fisher was a teenager. The audiovisual piece augment the physical reality of the viewer through a montage of various media forms, such as Fisher’s voice over, images of news reports, and fictitious audio and images. While the rhythm of Fisher’s voice dictates the pace of the viewer as they walk, her words build an affective past, a queer space. The voice over and ambient sounds enact a multilayered space that accommodates marginalised bodies and redefines the limits of centreperiphery. Although sound is often situated at the peripheries of the visual in the viewer’s experience and in analytical work, sound immerses the viewer in a new (virtual) space, and imprints meaning on the viewer’s both physical and virtual environments. The multilayered reality of ‘Chez moi’ in this way recalls Janet Cardiff’s AR-vanguardist photographic audio walk ‘Her long black hair’ (2004) ten years prior. The aural, visual and haptic assemblage of Fisher’s and Cardiff’s pieces disturb the ‘conceived space’ of Toronto’s streets, and produce queer ‘lived spaces’ (in Henri Lefebvre’s terms, 1981) by generating resonances between past and present space-times. This paper shows how Fisher’s assemblage transforms the established ‘powergeometry’ of space (Doreen Massey, 1994), as it creates an affirmative queer space ELO2019 University College Cork #ELOcork 52 accommodating the ‘[fragile] women’s culture’ that Fisher at once praises and bemoans. At the intersection of cultural geography, cinema studies, and digital culture, this paper attempts to understand how digital media call to the imagination to invoke possible futures (Appadurai 1996; Braidotti 1996), and to constantly (re-)make space.

This paper looks at two interactive digital works where female-centred/lesbian desire provides an implicit logic and motivation to the works’ interactivity, which focusses on the control and transgression of language. This wordplay is aimed at resisting dominant regimes of phobic categorization and erasure that pathologize queer desire. In Lucky Special Games’ visual novel Locked-In, the interactor experiences the story through the perspective of Jacqueline Brown, who, as the result of a car crash, has locked-in syndrome, which is characterized by consciousness paired with the complete paralysis of the voluntary muscles. Each of the women who visit Jacqueline's hospital room has a motive for wanting Jacqueline incapacitated or dead, so when Jacqueline discovers that she can slightly move the little finger on one hand, she must decide to which of these women she should reveal that she is conscious. Perhaps the most striking characteristic of Locked-In is its casual indication of Jacqueline’s lesbianism (inferred via her relationship with her spouse Delilah). This lack of explicit labelling suggestively contrasts with the governing structural conceit of LockedIn: the dictionary entry, which plays on the hoary “if you look up [term] in the dictionary, you’ll find [person]’s name” joke. The cumulative effect of the wordplay results in lesbianism in Locked-In eventually escaping the fatalistic homophobic imaginary of dominant definitional regimes and causal logics while simultaneously eschewing a (hetero)normative “happy ending.” The second work, Neven Mrgan and James Moore's Blackbar, requires the interactor to unredact an archive of communications to a young woman, Vi Channi, from her friend Kentery Jo Loaz and others conducted under an Orwellian regime of expressive surveillance geared towards conformance, ‘sanitization’ and ‘propriety.’ The process of unredaction enables a queer reading of the relationship between Vi and Kentery and the Resistance they join. Unlike the blackbar redactions of the callous Listener #19445 and their grotesque attempts to make their redactions humorous, 'Lorraine,' as I will call the Resistance agent, engages in clever and pleasurable open box word play that exposes the slipperiness and queerness of language. Both works show how close reading and textual and formal analysis can be applied to interactive or ergodic works to reveal the same kinds of subtextual and subversive richness that characterize conventional literature, problematizing beliefs that eLit’s home is at periphery of the literary.

This paper explores the concept of narrativity in the city by analyzing the project Queering the City of Literature (#QtCoL), a distributed narrative inspired by Implementation (Rettberg and Montfort). Distributed narratives are literary texts that are distributed across different spaces and times to create divergence rather than unity (Walker 1). Implementation and #QtCoL build on several modern-day practices: both of the works consist of text fragments that participants were invited to put up in places of their choice on public surfaces. The texts were photographed and posted online.  



This paper analyses the work by means of a "diffractive reading" (Barad and Haraway) between the narrative and its urban context. Central to my analysis is my observation during the of #QtCoL event, which I co-organized, to understand the choices and experiences of people while choosing locations for text fragments.

The practice of putting up the texts highly influences the way in which the actor views the city, looking for an appropriate place for the narrative. The actor is invited to connect elements in the text fragment to elements in their surroundings. The actor who places the text might not have noticed certain elements if it hadn't been for the text fragment. Once the text fragment is placed in its context, the opposite occurs: the context influences how the narrative is read. Once the text fragment is placed, the surroundings influences the reading of the narrative.

This diffraction between narrative and context is highlighted by the act of photography, which shows the immediate context of the text but makes the city as a whole invisible. For the 'analog' reader, however, the context of the whole city is highly visible as the text has to be found inside the city. The combination of analog and digital practices thus highlights the representation of the city as a visual practice. In addition, the invitation to post images of the project on social media furthers the experience of ‘taking up space’ and having a presence, not only in the city but online as well. 

(source: ELO 2018 website)

Melissa Gregg reviews Eve Sedgwick’s Touching Feeling