Disruption, dis/orientation, and intra-action : recipes for creating a queer utopia in audiovisual space

Abstract

Finally, I investigate the collective notion of these queer utopias, and how queering blurs the notion of agency and blends disciplinary boundaries of the process of artmaking. Although there is no doubt that gender and sexuality have greatly informed art practices in the past, further discussion is necessary to connect these concepts with contemporary art sites that will allow audiences to become immersed in a feminist queer multisensory experience. My practice and dissertation text intend to aid in filling that gap and contribute to the debate of feminist queer theory and emerging technologies in digital media, offering a model for feminist queer audiovisual spaces that is theoretically informed and affectively engaged. I demonstrate how the field of experimental media technologies tends to not acknowledge queerness in its literature and ignore queer methodologies which have been informing art practices for decades. My contribution to existing scholarship is to bridge the fields of feminist queer theories, new materialism, and media technologies through my own practice.

In Disruption, dis/orientation, and intra-action : recipes for creating a queer utopia in audiovisual space, I investigate the concepts of dis/orientation (Sara Ahmed), intra-action (Karen Barad), haptic visuality (Laura U. Marks), queer futurity (José Esteban Muñoz), and queer failure (Jack Halberstam), and rematerialize these concepts through media technologies and experimental artmaking. I examine two defiant strategies of queer culture makers—namely disruption and dis/orientation—in relation to queer embodiment in abstract art practices. I discuss how some of these strategies have been used in feminist and/or queer artists’ work such as Barbara Hammer, Pauline Oliveros, and Cassils. I analyze my own body of work, Moved in Noir (2016), Moved in Light (2017), and Surface Connection (2018), and offer recipes to create a blueprint for a utopian collective future in experimental audiovisual performance practices.