About my paper:

"It is no coincidence that the most recent crises faced by democracy and empire have been accompanied by a dramatic increase in queer and trans visibility in the visual arts. The continued success of major entertainers like Laverne Cox and RuPaul, and “art world” stars like Wu Tsang and Tourmaline, in troubling the gender binary—a source of so much pain and oppression—offers new ways of being precisely at a moment of global upheaval. As a person walking the slippage between binaries, I have often found that my work—evolving from drawing, painting, and sculpture to video, performance, and plays, and finally now to film and television—defies easy categorization. However, I also have a desire to be made legible, and to touch a larger public—especially of other queer and trans/non-binary individuals—with my work, which has led me to codify my art into increasingly mainstream forms. The challenge for myself and my peers is to preserve the queer wildness of our work—the intricacies of queer and trans life that are so unintelligible to the cisgender, heterosexual majority that often sets the boundaries of what is considered “mainstream”—while accessing the resources, and the recognition, necessary for such work. In this presentation, I will explain how these issues are tackled in my practice—particularly in my MFA thesis film, PONY—and the practices of my moving-image peers, in the process creating a New Trans Cinema."

About the panel:

"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."