Queering New Media Art: looking back, looking forward (original) (raw)

Queering Gender, Art & Culture in an Age of Media Convergence

Sage Handbook of Cultural Sociology , 2016

Cultural examinations focusing on the spheres of the Fine Arts and popular media forms – within sociology, gender studies and cultural studies – have primarily focused on how gender roles affect the ability to fully participate in all aspects of culture, or how media representations have promoted essentialist and heteronormative narratives and visual imagery. Much of the scholarship thus far has looked at culture and gender from a traditional binary perspective (high/low, male/female, production/reception). However, the recent emergence of the interdisciplinary field of queer studies (within the last decade) and the study of post-internet participatory media culture(s) offer new conceptual and empirical terrain to explore gender and sexuality. Radical feminist and queer media forms challenge us to reconsider the creation, distribution and reception of culture, and present opportunities to resist, and in some cases pervert, dominant narratives, policies and ways of seeing.

Queer (Documents of Contemporary Art)

Historically, “queer” was the slur used against those who were perceived to be or made to feel abnormal. Beginning in the 1980s, “queer” was reappropriated and embraced as a badge of honor. While queer draws its politics and affective force from the history of non-normative, gay, lesbian, and bisexual communities, it is not equivalent to these categories, nor is it an identity. Rather, it offers a strategic undercutting of the stability of identity and of the dispensation of power that shadows the assignment of categories and taxonomies. Artists who identify their practices as queer today call forth utopian and dystopian alternatives to the ordinary, adopt outlaw stances, embrace criminality and opacity, and forge unprecedented kinships, relationships, loves, and communities. Rather than a book of queer theory for artists, this is a book of artists’ queer tactics and infectious concepts. By definition, there can be no singular “queer art.” Here, in the first Documents of Contemporary Art anthology to be centered on artists’ writings, numerous conversations about queer practice are brought together from diverse individual, social and cultural contexts. Together these texts describe and examine the ways in which artists have used the concept of queer as a site of political and institutional critique, as a framework to develop new families and histories, as a spur to action, and as a basis from which to declare inassimilable difference.

Notes toward an “Open” Conversation on New Media Art and Ending the Politics of Exile

Afterimage: The Journal of Media Arts and Cultural Criticism, 2012

As a curator who works at the intersection of film and "Media Art" or "New Media," and like anyone who works in a specific area for a period of time, I regularly come to question what lured me to the field. Medium has always been of interest to me, but I also believe that I came to this generic turf (oft considered a subfield of the visual arts) because of a certain sense of exile I felt when operating within the broader schema. By exile I refer to the sense of being an outsider. Coming from a film and visual arts background, I was not schooled within the conventional mold of an art historical discourse (although this has changed through self-education). Indeed, influential media art curators from Steve Dietz to Sarah Cook, a colleague who co-runs the Curatorial Resource for Upstart Media Bliss (CRUMB) email list-have observed that new media is like visual art, but with noted differences. The emphasis on processes and networks has been considered divergent or separate from the museological objecthood often theorized in art historical discourse. As culture continues to subsume dividends, there evolves a narrative that equally encompasses the travails of a Paris Hilton sex tape and the work of famous YouTube artists such as Marisa Olson and Ryan Trecartin (who directly critique that narrative). Bearing this in mind, I find myself scratching my head at the continued historical subdivisions of so-called "Media Art." My experience at international symposia suggests that the construct of media art history in academic discourse has been arced around an obsession with reconciling the relationship between art and technology for an audience with so-called "high art" concerns. To the younger generation of curators: media art seems to speak from a position of lack. I refer to lack in the postcolonial sense of the word-a discourse I believe I am well versed in. It is a lack that is built on an Orientalist politics of outright exclusion, based on a very didactic and diametric fear of the "Other." For so-called contemporary new media artists and curators, this apparent lack seems all but "imagined." We are in control of our fate. Our destiny. What was once our exile is now our source of empowerment. Not tied to binding contracts with private gallery owners, the world as manifest through virtual and cross-embedded screens is our platform, our all-embracing oyster. Why do we need an inherent predisposition that continues to define a narrative of struggle for artists with media-led practices? A narrative that continues to propagate the notion that medium-led practices are held in a separate light from the broader canon of the visual arts and culture? Isn't it anachronistic? The past three decades have materialized in significant ways. We have witnessed the birth of electronic and media art departments within universities, as well as international conference series on the subject. They have proliferated in tandem with global capital. But, when culture becomes remixed and hyperlinked, labels become contestable. The capitalization of the words "Media Arts" and "Electronic Art," for instance, are by their very nature framing devices initiated and applied by an outdated historical movement, whose vernacular has since become especially directed toward a "select" group of self-subscribing individuals. I would like to take this opportunity to be as polemical as possible. I would like to provoke the thought that these terms and constructs (for example, "Media Art Histories," "Electronic Art," "New Media") are self-constricting and exiled formations or spaces. These strictures must be shifted to encompass and enable a more fluid formation for the creation of a broader schema. This may be a written or unwritten history, but whatever the case, it must enable a more malleable and "open" frame for the appropriation of media-based technology and its relationship to visual culture. I know that I, and the many artists I work with, would like to stop living in self-fulfilling exile and self-marginalization. …

Editor's Note: Queering Art Education

Visual Arts Research, 2020

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Fuck It New Media Art Design and representation

The advent of New Media has not only made considerable contributions to the cannon of art but has in essence shaken its very foundations. Anxieties appear when New Media role players, artists and 'commercialised users' have to "play nice". Disrobing the participatory process of art and design through the use of communication technologies fucking provides an interpretation of New Media in the locale of sexual consumption. South Africa is still grappling with the technologies of a post industrial age. Access is not a matter of fact and literacy of such media cannot be taken for granted. Fucking around with sexual (re)presentation is a dangerous liaison. There is an inherent hesitation to equate South African erotic with colonial imports of uncivilised sexual prowess. This risky enclosure investigates the uncomfortable intercourse of discourse on Art, Design and Queer theory. In a techno-socio-sexual economy where information is readily available and almost nothing is unattainable, is fucking the common ground for these uncomfortable bedfellows? Within the lines of computer code and pixel can we, as artist and designers, remap an(other) erotic? Can we (re)present that which has remained mis-represented?

First Fagnostics: Queering Art Education

The Journal of Social Theory in Art Education, 2017

First Fagnostics is an outgrowth of Big Gay Church, a recurring annual conference research presentation/ performance at the National Art Education Association convention focused on the intersections of art, education, religion, and love with lesbian, gay, bisexual, transgender, queer (LGBTQ+) issues and concerns.1 Big Gay Church refers to an ensemble of LGBTQ+ art educators and allies, an ongoing annual session at the annual National Art Education Association conference (now entering its 9th year), and the collective whole of the clergy and congregation. Collectively, Big Gay Church presents/enacts/demonstrates/deploys critical arts-based educational research and pedagogies to explore the intersections of religion, sexuality, art, education, and activism (Rhoades, Davenport, Wolfgang, Cosier, & Sanders, 2013). This "letter"is written by two members to the Flock of Big Gay Church for instruction, information, support, and continuing connection between leaders and the congre...