For this assignment, I had a hard time trying to find something that both incorporated a compelling interface with different forms of accessibility and had a more queer focus. I found a curated art project on the Center of Art and Thought’s website called Queer Sites and Sounds. Though Drucker states that “The field of visual epistemology draws on alternative histories of images produced primarily to serve as expressions of knowledge. For the study of graphesis, attention to fine art images will be largely left aside in favor of attending to the vast array of visual work produced for the purposes of interpretation or analysis in other fields” (17). So with this, I know I’m somewhat moving away from what Drucker is attempting to look at in her work, but I was captivated by this project by how it plays with time and representation of “fine art” online in a very queer presentation.
The curated work draws from various types of media. According to the artist statement at the top of the page: “Queer Sites and Sounds will feature digital artwork, videos, audio recordings, scholarship, and writing that question the ways that we think of ‘queer’ as an embodied identity and ‘queer’ as it relates to narrative and digital forms and digital literacies.” This project is very much engaging with how the queer meets the digital. This project translates queerness from various perspectives and through different forms. Queerness is defined in the artist statement as “’queer’ is defined broadly to include non-heteronormative genders and sexualities in both Filipino and Western contexts (e.g., LGBTQ, bakla, and tomboy) as well as performativity and aesthetics (e.g., ‘kitsch,’ ‘spectacle,’ and ‘camp’) that challenge and go beyond how Filipino bodies, affects, and processes are conventionally understood.” This project both challenges artistic forms and presentation as well as larger socio-political representations of queer bodies.
I both like the range of different types of media as well as the way they are presented on the site “Unlike real-time, real-world exhibitions in which the works are revealed all at once and often in a singular space, the works in Queer Sites and Sounds will unfold on CA+T’s website in stages.” The Queer Sites and Sounds exhibit is very much addressing the way that “high” art is often located and revealed in a single space, but this approach makes these images differently accessible online. They are not arranged in any linear fashion, but instead fit into its own non-linear queer temporality.
