About the Author
This website represents the culmination of my time at the University of Texas at Austin receiving my Masters in Media Studies.
​
I first began to take an interest in machine-human interactions and relationships in Dr. Sharon Strover's "Communication, Technology, and Culture" class, where I was first introduced to the digital influencer Lil Miquela. Miquela was the start of my thinking about the ways that we integrate machines and technology into our daily lives. In following this line of enquiry, I found myself contemplating the way that in taking a recuperative stance toward technology, and in looking at our images of machines and tech through a queer lens, can reveal new modes of being in the world. I found myself transfixed by the ways that these creations are frequently the backdrop that allow humans a way to imagine a different world and a different self. More often than not, these imaginings take on a distinctly counter-hegemonic sensibility.
Halfway through “Communication, Technology, and Culture” (Spring 2020), the COVID-19 pandemic forced us into remote online courses. I’m writing this section on the one-year anniversary of the World Health Organization declaring a worldwide pandemic. Since then, I’ve completed the majority of my Masters remotely.
This project is meant to be explored in a nonlinear fashion. Other than coming to this entrance page, there is no clear cut beginning or end. This website, the culmination of my time at the University of Texas at Austin in pursuit of my Masters in Media Studies, is meant to be interactive and accessible. It is my hope that it is constructed in such a way that it's traversable and understandable, regardless if the user has a Masters degree or not. In creating an amorphous network of hyperlinks, videos, images that connect both intra- and intertextually, I wanted to replicate an alternate (and networked) temporal space in an effort to place the user at the nexus of machinic connectivity.
​
Click on any of the images to begin!
Queer Relations with Technology and Machines
In our exceedingly digital and virtual world, we are increasingly met with images and realities that have been created and influenced by machines. This project attempts to grapple with these creations. This website takes a critical look at the virtual influencer Lil Miquela, the deepfakes used to mask the identity of LGBTQ refugees from Chechnya in Welcome to Chechnya (2020), temporalities and bodies in The Matrix (1999), and corporeality in Her (2013). Through a queer theoretical lens, all of these texts offer differing approaches to imagine technology, its effect on our lives, and the means by which it can be utilized to both support and upend the power structures of capitalism, the State, and heteronormativity.
