A fast-paced symposium exploring the ways that LGBT communities and artists have responded to emerging technologies, innovations, and scientific paradigms.

For this unique event, we assemble a coterie of bold thinkers from a range of fields to explore provocative ideas and concepts relating to “queered” science and technology.

Have advances in medicine given us new agency over our own biology? What is the ‘trans’ in ‘transhumanism’? How has the internet changed the nature of queer community? Have new media technologies changed the modes of representation available to artists?

With contributions from film scholar Elinor Cleghorn, writer Sophie Mayer, media scholar Sharif Mowlabocus, psychologist Qazi Rahman, sociologist Celia Roberts, and sociologist and artist Nina Wakeford.

Across the session, we’ll look at queer experimental film from the past 30 years which has engaged with ideas about technology – at the level of content and/or form. Works to be screened include:

Me and Rubyfruit
USA 1990. Dir Sadie Benning. 6 min.

She Puppet
USA 2001. Dir Peggy Ahwesh.

Guy 101
USA 2006. Dir Ian Gouldstone. 9 min.

(Tommy-Chat Just E-mailed Me.)
USA 2006. Dir Ryan Trecartin. 7 min.

Facial Weaponization Communiqué: Fag Face
USA 2013. Dir Zach Blas. 8 min.

RECKONING 3
USA 2014. Dir Kent Lambert. 11 min.

Ideas will pile up, multiply and crash into each other in a high-energy session that will hopefully prompt much discussion and creative stimulation.

After this event, there will be opportunity for discussion, and to hear further microtalks, in the Atrium in amongst the Year Dot: Queer Film + Technology Since 1986 installation.

David Edgar, BFI Education Programmer