Dr Francesco Bentivegna and Katy Dadacz (PhD) are running a two-day event on Queer Methodologies in Creative Technologies.
This two-day conference and workshop on the 29-30 June will be an opportunity for methodological reflection and collaboration around queer practices in creative technologies.
What methods do queer researchers and artists use when they engage with creative technologies such as virtual reality, creative computing, and animation?
What identities are privileged when technologies are imagined, narrated, designed, and used?
How can practices be queered (using methods and processes that resist binary and hierarchy, and subvert heteronormative structures)?
Participants will re-think and recalibrate research methods to not only understand the complexity of queer approaches but to imagine alternative creative technology practices.
This project blossomed from a long-standing interest in creative collaboration between humans and technologies which has been explored at the Future Speculations Reading Group run by Francesco and Katy at the Pervasive Media Studio. Beginning in October 2022, academics, artists and creative technologists from the University of Bristol, University of the West of England, Pervasive Media Studio, Control Shift Network and Queer Tech Meet Up discuss texts exploring themes such as artificial intelligence, algorithmic creativity, machine learning and feminist hacking. The reading group critically engages with artist practices, as well as film and literary responses. (If you would like to sign up, please email katy.dadacz@bristol.ac.uk)
The event is in collaboration with artists-in-residency at the Watershed’s Pervasive Media Studio and creative technologists at Ctrl Shift Network and Queer Tech Meet Up. The interactive workshop will explore queer metaphors and materials that can help to expand creative technologies, as well as teaching low-tech solutions such as DIY servers. The symposium invites creative technologists at the Pervasive Media Studio and researchers at UoB and UWE from a range of disciplines to share their work, and a ‘thought experiment’ or question set. After each presentation, the participants, in small groups, will have time to engage with what has been proposed.
Thank you to the University of Bristol for providing the Research Initiative funding for this conference to happen!