Operational Visibility: Trans and Queer Digital Hybrid Art Practices

In the hybrid ecosystem we navigate as queer and trans cyborgs, drawing on the work of Susan Stryker, Shu Lea Cheang, Mackenzie Wark, micha cárdenas, Paul Preciado, Urvashi Vaid, and others, we ask: How do queer and trans perspectives and embodiment manifest in the generation of digital/physical hybrid art practices? What convergences exist between the emergence of digital ubiquity and queer culture post Stonewall? How do vectors of visibility operate to platform trans and queer people, while at the same time presenting new dangers? How do vectors of invisibility provide cover even as they reintroduce the constrictions of the closet?

LGBTQ communities often use punk / hacker / DIY / DIT approaches to produce community-specific media from the physical (chapbooks, newspapers, zines, and magazines) to the digital (forums, chatrooms, and websites). Operational Visibility draws on these traditions to explore digital/physical hybrid art practices driven by trans and queer approaches, theories, and people. We seek to assemble a panel of practitioners, theorists, and historians whose work addresses mechanical, analog, and IRL interfaces with digital technologies and environments. We are excited to focus on: work born out of our increasingly marbled experience of the virtual in everyday; investigations of the digital not as display conduit but as logic itself; intersectional interventions by BIPOC artists and theorists and their accomplices; the (re)consideration of influential early digital art works; and processes and workflows that loop between/through the digital and physical.