DIY HRT and other profane machines for punishment and pleasure

DIY HRT and other profane machines for punishment and pleasure

As a critical game engineer I am constantly engaged in the practice of meddling with and the reshaping of the boundaries of (digital) systems: Breaking open and suturing game engines to make them work towards my own nefarious purposes. A profane practice, a ritual of the flesh.

As a trans person too, I struggle against the systems in which I exist: Social, political, bureaucratic and medical apparatuses, where one first unearths and then falls through the cracks. Only to then blossom within those gaps like moss growing in between the sidewalk. Navigating and bending that space, making it one’s own.

With the internet steadily having become one such apparatus of bezel-less-ness (i.e. seeming to lack a means of prying it open and messing around with it), of obscuring it’s material actualities and affordances, I want to examine some ways people have managed to find footholds and gaps within it.

In this talk we will look at artistic practices of circuit-bending, gender-bending, speedrunning, digital ornament, jank, diy. In other words: The profane intervention in a system that expose its presumed rigidity as actually being malleable, plastic, brittle: One can damit rumspielen; play (around) with it. Not just as a practice of euphoria and joy, but also as a political accelerant that keeps our desire for different futures aflame.

Or, as Porpentine Charity Heartscape put it their curatorial statement for Dire Jank in 2019:
The internet is now our infinite library and we anxiously sift through it (…) We scavenge the astroturf tundra for genuine creatures of information, hoping they speak the same language as our heart. But until then, we put our jury-rigged beacons into the world, hoping we haven’t lost too much blood in the rite.