Panel Statement
Chair Person: Zach Blas
Presenters: Elle Mehrmand & Micha Cárdenas
The intensification and proliferation of global connectivity has opened digital networked culture to universal contagion. Indeed, it has been argued we now live in a viral ecology under the sign of viral capitalism. As viralities spread into various realms of culture, new media artists explore the viral as that which has the ability to control and restrict as well as distribute and liberate. Our current viral ecology has opened up new tactics of resistance for various artists, activists, and cultural producers. In this panel, we will focus on queer new media art and philosophy that uses and intervenes into the viral to form a radical politics of revolt and utopia. The viral will be engaged with technically, philosophically, artistically, biologically, and affectively. Our aim is to show that while viral rhetoric and discourses have marginalized and controlled queer populations, the viral remains an allusive, volatile potential that can be experimented with toward creating new queer politics and worlds. Blas, Cárdenas, and Mehrmand will give theoretical artist talks, and Skanse will follow with a philosophical response to the viral in media theory. Cárdenas and Mehrmand will discuss their current collaboration virus.?cirus, an episodic series of performances using wearable electronics and live audio to bridge virtual and physical spaces that explores queer futures of latex sexuality amidst a speculative world of virus hysteria and DIY medicine. Blas will speak on new works from his ongoing Queer Technologies project that attempt to formulate a viral aesthetics based on a replicating difference of never-being-the-sameness against capital’s own modulating structure. Skanse will address new directions in viral philosophy with particular concern for how this perpetual ‘movement’ of the virus is tied to notions of novelty within contemporary aesthetic discourse.
- Zach Blas is an artist and writer working at the intersections of networked media, queerness, and the political. His current project, Queer Technologies, is an organization that develops applications and situations for queer intervention and social formation. Zach has exhibited at the Foundation for Art and Creative Technology in Liverpool, Highways Performance Space, Los Angeles Contemporary Exhibitions, File Electronic Language International Festival in Brazil, and the 2010 Arse Elektronika Festival in San Francisco, where he was the recipient of a Prixxx Arse Elektronika. He has recently published in version.org and has work forthcoming in Fibreculture Journal. His work has been written about in Wired, Canon Magazine, and the South Atlantic Quaterly. He is also a PhD student in Literature and Visual Studies at Duke University, US.