Queer Media Art & Theory on empyre

This month Empyre is devoting to a conversation on Queer Media Art & Theory including Rhizome contributor Jacob Gaboury. The conversation is moderated by Zach Blas, (interviewed by Gaboury for Rhizome in 2010.)

 

Moderated by Zach Blas (US) and Micha Cárdenas (US) with Amanda Philips (US), Margaret Rhee (US/Korea), Jacob Gaboury (US), Jack Halberstam (US), Homay King (US), Michael O’Rourke (Ireland), Jordan Crandall (US), Patricia Clough (US), Lauren Berlant (US), Pinar Yoldas (Turkey/US), Ricardo Dominguez (US), Heather Davis (Canada) and more. http://empyre.library.cornell.edu/

This month’s focus on empyre will explore queerness and its relations to media art and theory. Featured guests will introduce their artistic and theoretical practices to consider and reflect upon the multiplicitous terrain of queerness and technology.

We understand queer new media--art and theory--as something more than just new media produced by LGBTIQ peoples. Queer new media to us encompasses queer methodologies and political commitments, a general troubling of binaries from the technical level and beyond, a continuous challenging of gender roles, the explorations of possibilities for sexuality, alternative friendship and kinship structures, and a general desire for the non-normative, strange, subversive, and utopic. Importantly, queer new media for us is about the continual re-making and refashioning of queerness. New media theory has taught us for some time to pay careful attention to materiality, in all its human and nonhuman forms. Queer new media practices engage our material world and consider the shifting feedback loops between the construction of queerness and material existence. What happens to queerness when we engage it with / through new media?

These discussions emerged out of conversations between Blas and Cárdenas based on their shared practices. Recently, we created a mailing list, Q [http://lists.transreal.org/listinfo.cgi/q-transreal.org], because we saw a need for a space to hold sustained discussion about these topics. We plan to continue the fruitful conversation started on empyre after June on the Q list.