A Queer Arcades Project

Submission Type

Paper

Start Date/Time (EDT)

20-7-2024 2:15 PM

End Date/Time (EDT)

20-7-2024 3:15 PM

Location

Narrative & Worlds

Abstract

This presentation is an artist's talk that outlines the theoretical and methodological process undergirding two of our co-creations -- a graph database and an augmented reality installation linked under the theme "Queer Arcades." These pieces explore and enact a space where the edges of our bodies, our tools, and our technologies meet and intermingle. It is a space that we propose is particularly queer, and a site for both queer analysis and queer creativity. In that space, we’ve been weaving together poetry, elit, theory and ephemera, troubling the borders between technologies, selves, and others, enacting new stories about the intersection of queerness and technology. The talk traces the development of our ideas from conceptually mapping queer ideas, themes, and stories in a graph database (a structure which emphasises connections and associations) to mapping queer stories and ephemera in an AR installation, a structure more suited to affective, poetic, and immersive experiences.

The graph database maps a collection of interconnected concepts and sub-concepts suggested by the intersection of queerness and the digital into nodes (the dots, the concepts) and edges, (the connecting lines, their relations and connections). Conventional edges ("is connected to") were insufficient for what we hoped our graph would imply. So, we wrote what we call "nano stories" to connect our nodes, creating what we think of as the narrative connective tissue of the graph.

Following from the associative, interconnected narrative of the graph, we developed an AR installation that invites viewers into a queer XR ‘arcades project,’ (in the spirit of Walter Benjamin). The experience places users in AR alleyways, inviting them to time travel through archival photographs and documents, narrated by a cacophony of nano stories. We propose that the piece creatively invokes the palimpsest of queerness, blurring the queer past into the queer present, populating the present with our shared queer ghosts, all the while conjuring queer futures, crossing the boundaries of private and public, large-scale and intimate, augmented and mixed reality: an (im)perfect queer storytelling machine.

Bio

Maureen Engel is a Lecturer in Digital Culture at the University of Queensland

Caitlin Fisher is Professor of Cinema and Media Arts at York University and President of ELO

This document is currently not available here.

Share

COinS
 
Jul 20th, 2:15 PM Jul 20th, 3:15 PM

A Queer Arcades Project

Narrative & Worlds

This presentation is an artist's talk that outlines the theoretical and methodological process undergirding two of our co-creations -- a graph database and an augmented reality installation linked under the theme "Queer Arcades." These pieces explore and enact a space where the edges of our bodies, our tools, and our technologies meet and intermingle. It is a space that we propose is particularly queer, and a site for both queer analysis and queer creativity. In that space, we’ve been weaving together poetry, elit, theory and ephemera, troubling the borders between technologies, selves, and others, enacting new stories about the intersection of queerness and technology. The talk traces the development of our ideas from conceptually mapping queer ideas, themes, and stories in a graph database (a structure which emphasises connections and associations) to mapping queer stories and ephemera in an AR installation, a structure more suited to affective, poetic, and immersive experiences.

The graph database maps a collection of interconnected concepts and sub-concepts suggested by the intersection of queerness and the digital into nodes (the dots, the concepts) and edges, (the connecting lines, their relations and connections). Conventional edges ("is connected to") were insufficient for what we hoped our graph would imply. So, we wrote what we call "nano stories" to connect our nodes, creating what we think of as the narrative connective tissue of the graph.

Following from the associative, interconnected narrative of the graph, we developed an AR installation that invites viewers into a queer XR ‘arcades project,’ (in the spirit of Walter Benjamin). The experience places users in AR alleyways, inviting them to time travel through archival photographs and documents, narrated by a cacophony of nano stories. We propose that the piece creatively invokes the palimpsest of queerness, blurring the queer past into the queer present, populating the present with our shared queer ghosts, all the while conjuring queer futures, crossing the boundaries of private and public, large-scale and intimate, augmented and mixed reality: an (im)perfect queer storytelling machine.