How do bodies queer at the molecular level? How is this queering inextricably tied to industrial capitalism? And is there a way out of capitalist ruins, one that has been further exacerbated by the pandemic? Combining body and gender politics and environmental toxicity, this workshop centers on the concept of “open source estrogen,” the underlying premise that hormonal molecules are ubiquitously all around us, and available for us to hack, mutate, and become-with. Through this process of sociopolitical excavation, we can begin to “emancipate the hormone molecule,” unboxing its molecular mystique. The workshop will begin with a talk on hormonal histories and fictions and finish with a hands-on urine hormone extraction protocol as well as and a conversation with Fresh Fruit hosts Rox Anderson and Quinn Villagomez. The materials list can be found here for those who wish to follow along.
Can design be a realm of pure magic? How do designers manipulate symbols imbued with historical texture and richness? How does a trans spirit not only survive but thrive in abundance? Rin Kim—a New York–based trans multidisciplinary chimera, demi, hydra, mutt, graphic designer, filmmaker, alchemist, performance artist, writer, and yong (룡)—discusses these and other questions in a new interview. When asked banal questions about their design process and career Rin returns with mystical pleasures, spells of vengeance, and prayers of golden victory.
“The challenge for design,” according to curator and museum director Zoë Ryan, “is to recognize market forces and political constraints while maintaining enough distance to foster the imagination and allow critical positions that can reorganize and rethink economies, ecologies, information systems, and social groups using the languages, forms, and methods of design.” Here, Ryan pursues this idea through the vital work of designers Dunne & Raby, Mary Maggic, and Forensic Architecture.
What do our collective images of the future tell us about our priorities in the present? How do we design visions of the future intended to defuse other, more perilous futures? Published on the occasion of the exhibition Designs for Different Futures, this essay by designer, curator, and museum director Andrew Blauvelt examines the momentous game of catch-up that humanity must play in order to survive its own conceptions of the future.
Documentary Practices Can Give Visibility to Trans History
Oral history projects offer rich fodder for documentarians "who emphasize the voices of their subjects using their own words, no matter how odious they may be to power structures involved," writes Andrea Jenkins, a poet, Minneapolis City Council member, and transgender oral historian at the University of Minnesota’s Jean Nicholas Tretter Collection Archives in GLBT Studies.
“In biological terms, movement is the foundational element of survival,” write the members of SuperGroup, the Minneapolis-based performance trio and guest curator of Choreographers’ Evening 2019. To introduce the 15 Minnesota dancemakers selected for this year’s edition, we present a portrait of participants through photography, video, and text in which each artist considers the source of this movement and their relationship between the body—its power, vulnerabilities, and aliveness—and possibilities for performance.
Touching a Third Sound: Trans-Sensing in a World of Deepfakes
In this world of cheap visual proliferation, we're forced to make quick binary judgments—i.e. real/fake, good/bad, man/woman—which often leave us feeling disempowered and reduced to slotting. In the 13th installment of the Artist Op-Eds series, composer and visual artist Jules Gimbrone proposes what they term Trans-Sensing as a model for a more nuanced way of experiencing the world, one that transcends the quantitative binary of real/fake and doesn't rely on the categorical flattening of complexity that comes with merely seeing.
The design canon is often the foundation of practices by educators in the field, but it is inherently reliant on impenetrable binaries. What would a queering of design education look like? What would a pedagogical approach that emphasizes asking questions instead of problem solving consist of? How can we understand designers as bodies in space, with agency, instead of simply “creatives”? And how can we understand bodies of text as living things that produce difficult conversations, instead of simply “content”? In our second edition of Soundboard, guest editor Nicole Killian puts these questions to Kristina Ketola Bore, Nate Pyper, Ginger Brooks Takahashi, and Ramon Tejada.
