Edge Effects Queer Virtual Arcades

What happens at the edges of bordercrossing technologies?

Edge Effects: Queer Virtual Arcades is an exploratory digital experiment, loosely inspired by Walter Benjamin’s Arcades Project, that queers the investigation into who, what and how emerging technologies connect with our bodies, lives and desires.  Part archive, part electronic literature, this work represents the first stage of a larger transmedia project by Engel and Fisher investigating tools, platforms and digital strategies that help us to weave together the digital and the analogue, human and machine, and interactivity that moves us beyond linearity to multiplicity. Our larger project aims to literalize the circuit formed by the digital and the queer, thus representing an emerging, heterogenous interactivity that produces radical possibilities – possibilities that we call edge effects.

The project archive showcased here uses Flourish to connect concepts with small questions and nano-stories. It is still in the early stages of development. Further iterations will experiment with multiple platforms – including an immersive, navigable space built in Unity, a social space in VR Chat and WebXR.  Ultimately, our Benjaminian digital arcade aims both to capture and perform some of these edge effects and includes new electronic writing alongside examples, ephemera and  experiments in spatial theorymaking. 

Taking our cues from both Walter Benjamin and Queer media, we’re building a kind of queer digital arcades - both platform and method - weaving together poetry, elit, theory and ephemera to perform an interactive, technoerotic story that troubles the borders between technologies, selves, others and the world. Our goal is to offer de-centred and multiple entry points to explore the increasingly ubiquitous technologies that summon our curiosities, vulnerabilities and penetrability, and implicate our skin, our memories of the basement bar, and our bravery.
This multivocal work includes both poetic and analytical texts, electronic literature and theory as we work to visually and associatively map a series of technologies and concepts into constellations and queer formations.
We understand and use the term “queer” methodologically – that is, we believe that queerness is a way of doing, whether that doing is in the production, consumption, or circulation of digital forms. The queerness here is in the very structure of the interface, the affordances of the platform, the non-linear, expansive, and associative logics that are revealed through exploration. The result is aspirational as much as, or more than, it is analytic, prompting users to imagine new speculative queer worlds as we all grapple with the ones we currently inhabit.
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click here for visualization and nano-stories in Flourish

We welcome your ideas and feedback

Suggest a platform. Tell us about the edge of your practice. Share a favourite work. Connect the dots for us in Flourish. Write us a poem. come on....

Maureen Engel

Maureen Engel is a lecturer in digital culture in the School of Communication and Arts at the University of Queensland and Associate Professor of Digital Humanities at the University of Alberta, Canada. At Alberta, she served as Director of Digital Humanities (2011-13; 2015-2019), and Director of the Canadian Institute for Research Computing in Arts (2011-2019). Formally trained as a textual scholar, her background is in cultural studies, queer theory, and feminist theory. Her principal research area is the spatial humanities, and the intricate relationships that inhere in and develop from the concepts of space, place, history, and narrative.  

Caitlin Fisher

Caitlin Fisher directs the Immersive Storytelling Lab @Cinespace Studios and the Augmented Reality Lab at York University in Toronto where she is also a Professor and Chair of the Department of Cinema and Media Arts. A co-founder of York’s Future Cinema Lab and former Fulbright and Canada Research Chair, Caitlin is an award-winning digital storyteller. She serves on the international Board of Directors for HASTAC, the Humanities Arts Science Alliance and Collaboratory, and as Vice-President of the Electronic Literature Organization.