Queer(y)ing Creative Practice
Beyond the mainstreaming of issues such as marriage equality, queer cultural practices investigate the arbitrary construction of cultural paradigms, driven by an intersectional approach to social justice and embodied lived experience. Queer cultural practices go #beyondyes to generate reparative actions by gently holding together alliances of practice, ideology, politics and experience.
Queerness is a slippery field that resists definition. More than an alternative term for gender and sexual diversity, it is a shifting coalition of political and cultural positions and strategies that critique, defy and ignore arbitrary normativity. Queer cultural practices have been deployed to interrogate the cultural construction of gender, race and disability. In the 21st century, queer cultural practices are turning increasing towards new materialism and posthumanism to interrogate the agency of things and the culturally constituted hierarchies of objects and subjects, positioning the artist as ‘a thing amongst things’.
Research Projects
Research Theme Leader
Dr Alison Bennett
Dr Alison Bennett works in ‘expanded photography’ where the boundaries of photography have shifted in the transition to digital media and become diffused into ubiquitous computing. Bennett’s recent projects explored the creative potentials of augmented reality, stereophotogrammetry, 3D scanning, and virtual reality as encompassed by the medium and practice of photography. As a neuroqueer trans-media artist, Bennett’s work has explored the performance and technology of gender identity and considered the convergence of biological and digital skin as virtual prosthesis. Her work has generated international viral media attention more than once; been featured on ABC TV Australian Story, the New York Times, Mashable, The Huffington Post, BuzzFeed, Motherboard, The Creators Project, KillScreen, ABC TV News, and The Guardian ‘best Australian photographs of 2015’.
alison.bennett@rmit.edu.au
Dr Nikos Pantazopoulos
Dr Nikos Pantazopoulos explores LGBTIQ+ politics through an immigrant CIS GAY LENS his work mediates art history and popular narratives that are influenced by hegemonic culture. Pantazopoulos' current research is engaged in Ancient Greek legacies and its influences' on modernism, minimalism, relational, outsider art activities and on labor and its economic values in our society. Pantazopoulos' materials critique the classical traditions of the arts to repurpose them through photographic data and a technologically driven lens.
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cast@rmit.edu.au
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