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Queertech.io is calling for digital and new media works from queer identifying artists. Be part of the ongoing conversation about #QueerTech.
Curated by the Queertech.io artist collective and Midsumma Festival, works selected will be premiered online and offline across multiple sites at Midsumma Festival 2018, including RMIT INTERSECT SPARE ROOM gallery & LIGHTSCAPES program, and Testing Grounds experimental video system. A selection of highlights will be screened at ACMI ART+FILM 2 February 2018.

Now more than ever, queer voices are vital to a continued socio-political discourse surrounding representation in a digital landscape. Queertech.io showcases a broad cross-section of the innovative, poignant and queer-as-hell works emerging from diverse queer communities.

In 2017, Queertech.io included works from artists in ten countries and spanned video works, games, gifs, 3D models, animations and interactive works. After premiering at Midsumma Festival 2017, the Queertech.io collection toured nationally and internationally.

Artists at all stages of their careers are encouraged to apply.

Presented in partnership with Midsumma Festival and supported by RMIT:ART:INTERSECT

Xanthe Dobbie 2017, ‘2001 Fuchsia Rose’ from the series 21st Century Greatest Hits Screensaver Pack

More Info

HOW WILL QUEERTECH.IO BE PRESENTED?

The project will be both an online exhibition (queertech.io) and offline across multiple sites at Midsumma Festival 2018, including RMIT INTERSECT SPARE ROOM gallery & LIGHTSCAPES program, and Testing Grounds experimental video system. A selection of highlights will be screened at ACMI ART+FILM 2 February 2018.

WHAT DO YOU MEAN BY QUEERTECH?

We conceive of ‘queer’ as an attitude and a strategy, a political/social affiliation and a cultural alliance. As outlined by David Getsy, ‘queer’ is an adjective, a modifier.

“Outlaw sensibilities, self-made kinships, chosen lineages, utopic futurity, exilic commitment, and rage at institutions that police the borders of the normal — these are among the attitudes that make up ‘queer’ in its contemporary usage […] Perhaps the best way to understand the stance that self-nominates as queer is to see that it is, fundamentally, adjectival. It does not stand alone. Rather, it attaches itself to nouns, wilfully perverting that to which it is appended. It is a tactical modiﬁcation – this name ‘queer’ – that invokes relations of power and propriety in its inversion of them. That is, its utterance brings with it two operations. First, it appropriates and affects the thing that it now describes (a queer what?). Second, this attachment of ‘queer’ to a noun necessarily cites the standards and assumptions against which it is posed (the presumed ‘normal’ that it abandons).” – David Getsy 2016, Intolerability and its attachments, QUEER, Documents of Contemporary Art.

In the same way that the glitch cracks the hyperreal veneer of digital media to reveal its underlying architecture, ‘queer’ is a strategy that reveals the workings of the power structures of normalcy. The glitch is not an error but an artifact of the materiality of the system. It takes work to maintain the veneer. Indeed, there is no single queer strategy. That is the point – it is a diverse range of attitudes and positions that resist (or simply ignore) standardising regulation.

Recognising that “all technical decisions are political”, #QueerTech artistic interventions evade arbitrary normative practices within digital culture. (If one wants to ascribe to a unifying political goal…) #QueerTech art practices occupy virtual spaces as ‘utopic futurity’, as an extension of the queer body like a virtual mental prosthesis.

#QueerTech conversations and practices include:

Nikki Sullivan & Samantha Murray 2009, Somatechnics: Queering the Technologisation of Bodies. Arising out of discussions of body modifications, Sullivan and Murray highlight the intersection of technicity and embodiment through a queer perspective.
Zach Blas 2007-2012, Queer Technologies.
Jacolby Satterwhite 2013, Dances with His Self, New York Close Up, ART21.
“Virtual space is a queer arena for my body to perform in”
Bennett, Beckwith & Payne 2016, Virtual Drag: speaking academically, VirtualDrag.net.
Fiona Barnett, Zach Blas, Micha Cardenas, Jacob Gaboury, Jessica Marie Johnson & Margaret Rhee 2016, ‘QueerOS: A User’s Manual’ in Debates in the Digital Humanities 2016.
Shaw & Sender, 2016, ‘Queer technologies: affordances, affect, ambivalence’, Critical Studies in Media Communication: Queer Technologies, volume 33, issue 1, http://dx.doi.org/10.1080/15295036.2015.1129429
Also, FYI, check out Jacob Gaboury’s 2013 ‘Queer History of Computing’, Rhizome

Our intention is to contribute to an ongoing conversation rather than formulate a resolved statement; to be dialogical rather than didactic.

BTW, we are particularly interested in works that occupy the intersection of digital art and embodied performance and that work well on mobile screens.

WHAT DO YOU MEAN BY ONLINE ARTWORKS?

“Internet art is a kind of art that uses the Internet as its mode of dissemination. The art is often interactive and/or participatory in nature and may use a number of different mediums. This method strays from the traditional gallery and museum system and gives even small artists a way of sharing their work with a large audience.Internet art can be created in all different types of media, including websites, software projects or gaming, streaming video or audio and networked performances. Internet art has its roots in various other genres, such as conceptual art, video art, performance art, street art, telematics art and kinetic art.” – http://www.techopedia.com/definition/25603/internet-art

Is the Web Browser Replacing the Art Gallery? | Idea Channel | PBS Digital Studios

Check out this compilation of interesting internet art projects here: https://placefacecyberspace.net/tag/internet-art/

TECHNICALLY, WHAT WILL WORK?

Works hosted on a website that can be embedded in the QueerTech.io website and that can also translate to large scale data-projection. We will project the work via a data-projector connected to a laptop.
We particularly like works that are effective via a mobile phone screen.

WILL THERE BE A SELECTION PROCESS?

Yes, selection of work will be announced by late November 2017

WHAT WILL YOU DO WITH NSFW STUFF?

NSFW content will be tagged #NSFW on the QueerTech.io website. We may not be able to screen NSFW content IRL as they are public venues.