Not rooted in a traditional culture or ancestral homeland, Queerness constitutes ephemeral cultures, continually reinvented and reimagined. Queerness is under constant threat of erasure from cultural amnesia and political malice. Academia and the art world have responded to this erasure with alternately heroic and halting efforts. This session attempts to assess various responses to queer erasure in the overlapping enclaves of new media art comprised of artists, academics, industry and institutional professionals. The session will explore this question from several perspectives, including institutional omission and professional struggles and new media artists who are working to code queer consciousness into the ubiquitous languages of new media cultures. Queer theorist, Jose Estaban Munoz writes, “Queer Utopian practice is about ‘doing’ and ‘building’ in response to the status of nothingness assigned to us by the heteronormative world.” What is the world of new media art doing that says something about this particular nothing?
Chairs: Richard Rinehart, Samek Art Museum, Bucknell University; Vagner Mendonça Whitehead, Texas Woman’s University
