My research dossier is an attempt to delve into the impacts of the internet on queer identity. Over the last 20-or-so years, the internet has offered new ways for queer people to form community, find each other, and express and define their identities. Most queer people under a certain age would say that the internet played some foundational role in the establishment and exploration of their identity, and yet sometimes queer theory and art can feel divorced from internet studies.

My dossier also collects some art and media that represents or speaks to these online subjectivities and performances. I am drawn to contemporary art that draws from internet cultures, but I often find it lacking in some way. Bringing virtual aesthetics and narratives into physical, traditional gallery space can sometimes feel trite or vapid, simply an act of recreation rather than commentary on something specific. However, I find it interesting to observe the tension that occurs when something virtual is brought into real, public space, such as artist Owen G. Parry’s physical reenactment of queer One Direction fanfiction. Even that sentence provokes fundamentally queer questions: does something have to be physical to be real?

Of the materials I collected, I found myself most interested in the pieces that represent or analyze the relationships between online queer spaces and offline physical space. Queering the Map is a lovely, and relatively positive example of this: it uses communal online space to highlight radically individual queer undercurrents in the physical landscape. More complicated is Sam Miles’ research, which analyzes the way that location-based apps like Grindr trouble physical queer spaces. When every space can be virtually queered, how must our conceptions of queer spaces shift?

I have been collecting these materials for a few years. Fittingly, my interest in the topic comes from conversations I have been having with an online friend, who is also a queer artist. We have been sharing material on this subject for a few years, after discussing how rare it is for media to speak adequately to the digital queer experience. A few items in the dossier are pieces they sent me.

I made a website for my dossier because it felt like the natural way to display this material. The cover image of my dossier is from a series of self-portraits I did in a photography class a few years ago, attempting to address my own identity as it exists between physical and virtual space. My current practice does not really engage at all with these questions of internet culture, but I am interested to continue to explore them, and possibly create more work in the future.

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