How can we make sense of the technologies around us through creative practices and queer insights?
Creative technology is developing at an extremely fast paced, from AI technologies to game design. Queer voices and perspectives have often been sidelined or overlooked, hindering the progress of the field, and depriving it of diverse insights. It is necessary for us to ask how we can make sense of the technologies around us, which we all encounter in varying ways, through creative practices and queer insights.
What participatory pedagogies allow knowledge-exchanges centered around queerness? What agency is afforded to queer people when imagining future technological development? How can we develop creative practices that bring queerness to the forefront of re-inventing approaches to technology?
Dr Francesco Bentivegna and Katy Dadacz have been excited to announce a two-day event that reflects on the questions that have grown from conversations in their July event, Queer Methodologies in Creative Technologies, and the Future Speculations Reading Group.
This event is for those interested in learning more and experimenting with queer practices and creative technologies- creative practioners, academics, researchers and artists.
When: 25-26th November
Where: Wickham Theatre
To get your free ticket, please click here.
Timetable
Saturday 25th November
10.30: Trans Pride March- meet outside Tesco Express (optional)
12.30-13.15: Lunch (provided)
13.15-15.15: Sound and Vision: Making Our Own Networks
15.15-15.30: Break
15.30-17.00: TBC (Talk/Utopian Storytelling Workshop)
Sunday 26th November
11.00-13.00 What is VTubing and How do I Make it Gay? ran by Yudi Wu
13.00-14.00 Lunch (provided)
14.00-15.00 Open Forum
Workshop Details
Sound and Vision- Building Our Own Networks ran by Harriet Horobin-Worley
Secret codes, mailing lists, telephone lines, WhatsApp groups – queer people have been making, breaking and hacking communication networks for hundreds of years. At a time when the climate emergency threatens the sustainability of Big Tech, and the geo-political climate makes our reliance on the whims of billionaires even more precarious, how can we ensure our community’s technological resilience?
This workshop will provide a space to interrogate the infrastructure that we use to build community, and the tools to imagine and partake in a new network. In the first half we will look at the hidden structures of the networks we use and some alternative methods of building DIY communication networks, including the basics of how pirate radio stations work. In the second half participants will be given prompts to create their own audio piece which will be published as part of a digital audio/visual piece online.
The event is perfect for anyone curious about radio, the internet or community building.
No technical knowledge or experience is required.
methods/sdohtem by MELT
Our work centers practices coming from Disability Justice and Trans*feminisms upholding ways of worlding that construct structures to make our flowing possible and dismantles ableist assumptions. Through playing with methods like starting twice, talking twice, undoing binaries, describing carefully, naming needs, reading nonlinearly and engaging with material agencies we will share methods|sdohtem that answer for us the question: How do we set up a value based practice?
What is VTubing and How do I Make it Gay? ran by Yudi Wu
How could the extremely online queer people contribute to their local queer community? How could local queer communities benefit from the digital world? This 2-hour workshop investigate this problem through a seemingly unlikely approach, VTubing.
Inspired by the 2000s queer icons, the queer communities in VR Chat & VTuber world, and Bristol’s wonderful local queer scene, this workshop invites you to imagine a VTuber (virtual entertainer) who can empower the local queer community. Expect a quick VTubing 101, world-building & character-building, and getting your hands on a few tech things.
No prior skills are needed. Both those who are extremely online, and those who are hyper-local, are welcomed. Please bring a laptop if you have one. Ideally one that runs on Windows 10, but something else is also fine!
Open Forum
An open discussion with MELT, Control Shift, Queer Tech Meet Up, artists, practitioners and workshop participants to reflect on what we have learnt, what futures we can imagine, and create a set of demands that bring queerness to the forefront of reinventing creative technologies.
Many thanks for the AHRC Impact Accelerator Fund for making this possible.
