Artist Statement

My work critically examines the impact of technological ideology and control on the body, gender, and knowledge and how this reshapes representation. I work in varying degrees between art and commerce to fully investigate and take a stance of resistance against contemporary flows of viral capitalism.

Currently, I am researching technologies that can be queered and/or identified as queer, and in turn, related to specific physically embodied queer acts. Queer technology functions as a practical and theoretical tool for resisting heteronormative formations of technological control. Queer technologies are political tools for queer technical agency that create social interstices for connectivity and communication.

Projects in progress include transCoder, a queer programming anti-language; ENgenderingGenderChangers, a “solution” to Gender Adapters’ male/female binary; GRID, a computer virus that calls upon the history and legacy of HIV/AIDS to assess hygiene, infection, memory, and queerness; Gay Bombs, a technical manual manifesto that outlines a “how to” of queer political action through terrorist assemblages of networked activism; and the Disingenuous Bar, a play / attack on Apple Computer’s Genius Bar for tech support that offers a heterotopic space for political support for “technical” problems.*

Attempts to formulate queer technologies implicate the urgency in carving out a queer freedom in hi-tech culture and providing the queer community with discursive / practical tools for activism, resistance, and empowerment.

• Zach Blas, MFA candidate, Department of Design, Media Arts, University of California, Los Angeles, USA