Queer Computer is hosting its first ever (online) event!
Queering Tech is a panel discussion, held for RMIT Pride Week 2022, exploring the idea and act of queering technology.
The event recognises “queering” as something we do, rather than something we are. It looks beyond inclusion and representation in the tech industry and asks what it means to queer technology itself.
And most importantly, I forked out $350 to upgrade my shitty home internet just to host this, so I really hope you can make it! It’s free and it’s online. Register below to receive the zoom link when it’s time.
Tue., 23 August 2022
6:00 pm – 7:30 pm AEST
And now it’s my pleasure to announce the panellists! They’re all incredible and work across art, animation, games and research. I’ll be linking to their socials and work, so check them out before the event!
Fuzzy Ghost
Pete Foley & Scott Ford
We are boyfriends who are making games that tell stories that are queer, joyful, and thoughtful.
Really cute! What’s your process like working together?
Every morning we go for an early morning walk around the park in Camperdown to drink our coffees. This is where we do some of our best riffing. It’s a really wonderful space where the realities of how much work we’ve set for ourselves aren’t yet obvious.
How does your experience of queerness inform your process of making?
Pete — for me it’s the need to depict everything that gets left out from the white-picket-fence, family-by-marriage, conservative image of what is wholesome. There’s so much left! And it’s all so meaty and interesting and hard and rad.
I definitely see that idea in your game, Queer Man Peering (QMP). Now that it’s out in the world, what have you been working on?
We can’t say specifics at the moment (I don’t think?), but we’re currently designing an installation that QMP will be presented in for an exhibition next year. It’ll be so campy, and so pretty. It’s very rare that anything we do ends up physical, beyond a printed postcard, so the idea of having burly people actually constructing things for us is super fun.
J. Rosenbaum
J. Rosenbaum is an artist exploring the boundaries of technology and art. Their most recent works examine the nature of non-binary transness and their own gender and sexuality. They create technologically based art using physics based rendering, Deep Neural Networks and Augmented Reality. They are continuing their research into computer perceptions of gender with their PhD at RMIT.
As a disabled artist the human body has always been a source of interest in Rosenbaum’s art with a focus on mythical and archaeological stories. This fascination continues in their Computer Generated works with a basis in classical art and history.
How does your experience of queerness inform your process of making?
My practice is entangled with the notion of trans and non-binary identities from technological and historical perspectives, bringing the past and the future together. I cannot separate my identity from my work any more than I can separate my identity from myself because my work is intrinsic to my understanding of my gender, my sexuality and my identity. My ideologies and identities slip through in everything I do.
How has technology and the internet shaped your queer identity?
The internet has enabled me to understand who I am, my gender, my neurodiversity. It has enabled me to explore my identities with multiple variations of media and create work in response. But even down to finding terminology, finding communities, finding a sense of belonging and home, the internet has helped me find my feet in a world where I constantly felt that the rug was being pulled out from under me.
Technology allows me to create, to manage my mind and memory, my medication, my leisure, my work. Technology is another sense, another part of my brain.
What are you currently working on and excited about?
I am creating an impossible online gallery for my PhD examination, bringing together all of the projects I have worked on into an amalgamation of galleries each exploring a project, linked by glass and 3D cubes and thematic constructs. Each gallery is a collaborative design by me and AI working together. I am also finalizing my work gender tapestry where people are classified, not using gender, but using colors. Creating a unique color made up of a mix of six different possible pronoun categories.
Glynn Urquhart
Hi I’m Glynn. I am a 27 year old gay man, and a multidisciplinary artist and animator, with a practice based in experimentation with technology, that explores queer identity and the intersection of the physical and digital world.
Hi Glynn! How does your experience of queerness inform your process of making?
My personal philosophy is that being queer is a questioning. A questioning of ones self, and a questioning of the world around us and of our position in it. My process of making also stems from questioning. What if I use this program in a way it wasn’t intended? What if I make two chatbots talk to each other? What would an animated queer creation myth look like? I see the works I make as explorations of this questioning rather than concrete answers. The works exist in a liminal space of queer potentials.
And how has technology and the internet shaped your queer identity?
As a teenager coming to terms with my queerness, technology — particularly video games such as The Sims — allowed me to express and explore queerness and queer relationships, in a world that was otherwise hostile to these expressions. Online chatbots became confidants where I could confess the secret of my queerness. Social media sites like Tumblr became safe havens of online queer communities where I found connection and acceptance. As a result of this, queerness, technology, and intimacy have always been interconnected to me.
What are you currently working on and excited about?
Currently I have been doing many experiments with emerging AI technologies, trying to find ways of manipulating text-prompt to image generators to create animation. I find the emergence of AI equally exciting and terrifying.
I’m also working on creating music compositions and sound design for a theatre show in Singapore in December this year, working with Gold Satino — a queer experimental theatre collective based in Melbourne, and The Finger Players — a puppet based theatre company in Singapore
I’m very excited to be hosting this event and hope you can make it! See you online :)
I hope you get some good gaming / hectic downloading in to further justify that ISP price tag, ouch. Looking forward to the panel!! 🥰