Thirteenth International Conference on The Image

Abstract

With this paper, I argue for the immediate dismissal of frameworks positioning virtual space as other than “real”. Using this shift in orientation as a crucial starting point, I posit that the virtual is not, and should not be, a space of fiction, nor a secondary locale, but rather a proliferating lifeline to the physical. The virtual contains power to expand; shapeshift; liberate. It allows for a doubling queerness that finds its breath in the vibrating pixels of a screen. How then, considering the ethical complexities of virtual counterparts, in the face of late-stage capitalism, surging white supremacist ideals, and violent regression of rights for queer and female-identifying bodies, do we take care to sustain the imaginative and life-affirming potentials these spaces allow for? Combining sculpture, formal analysis, psychoanalysis, and contemporary feminist theory, I utilize the lens of my own “invisible”, queer identification to advocate for the power in viewing the physical and the digital as tender counterparts. As I work to locate my body between these shifting and overlapping spaces, I find potency in challenging expectations for what the physical and digital are prepared to hold together: surrogacy and mediation being key to my thinking. I track progression of these ideas, mining sculptural materials, endurance-driven processes, and theoretical technologies which comprise my studio practice and exploring contemporary technologies of queer pleasures through material proxy and virtual allowances. Out of this comes offerings of alternative orientation; a possibility that the future of virtual spaces might contain the physical, the “actual”.