Queer technologies

João Florêncio (he/him) is Senior Lecturer in History of Modern and Contemporary Art and Visual Culture at the University of Exeter, UK. A queer cultural theorist of the body, sexuality, and their visual cultures, his research navigates the ways in which the desiring-body has been produced, policed, mediated and contested as a site of creative world-making in modern and contemporary cultures. João’s work has appeared in journals like Porn Studies, Sexualities, Performance Research, Performance Philosophy, Somatechnics, and Radical History Review, as well as various edited collections. He the the author of Bareback Porn, Porous Masculinities, Queer Futures: The Ethics of Becoming-Pig (Routledge, 2020).

Shu Lea Cheang (she/her) is an artist and filmmaker whose work aims to re-envision genders, genres, and operating structures. Her genre bending gender hacking practices challenge the existing operating mechanisms and the boundaries imposed on society, geography, politics, and economic structures. As a net art pioneer, her BRANDON (1998 - 99) was the first web art commissioned and collected by New York’s Solomon R. Guggenheim Museum. Her feature length films, FRESH KILL(1994), I.K.U. (2000) and FLUIDø (2017), respectively termed ecocybernoia, sci-fi cyberpunk, and sci-fi cypherpunk, seek to define a genre of new queer sci-fi cinema. From homesteading cyberspace in the 90s to her current retreat to post-netcrash BioNet zone, Cheang takes on viral love, bio-hack in her current cycle of works. Cheang is currently at work on UKI, a sci-fi viral alt-reality cinema.

Mary Maggic (they/them) is a nonbinary artist and researcher working within the fuzzy intersections of body and gender politics and capitalist ecological alienations. Since 2015, Maggic frequently uses biohacking as a xeno-feminist methodology and collective practice of care that can serve to demystify invisible lines of molecular biopower. After completing their Masters at MIT Media Lab (Design Fiction) in 2017, their project “Open Source Estrogen” was awarded Honorary Mention at the Prix Ars Electronica in Hybrid Arts, and in 2019 they completed a 10-month Fulbright residency in Yogyakarta, Indonesia investigating the relationship between Javanese mysticism and the plastic pollution crisis. Maggic is a recipient of the 2022 Knight Arts + Tech Fellowship, and is a current member of the online network Hackteria: Open Source Biological Art, the laboratory theater collective Aliens in Green, the Asian feminist collective Mai Ling, as well as a contributor to the radical syllabus project Pirate Care and to the CyberFeminism Index collections.