Compromised Coded Spaces & Neuroqueer Counterpublics - Fine Print Art Magazine - Issue 32 Digital - Article - 2023

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‘IT MATTERS WHAT STORIES MAKE WORLDS’

Virtual, coded spaces, folding and unfolding, have long been a refuge for the outsiders; extending the borders of bodily experience and textural publics through co-created digital counterpublics.

Artists looking towards future selves and the virtual dimension question what future publics will technology create and what future selves will be included. Digital counterpublics emerged as rich sites of creative resistance and speculation from those resisting or excluded from dominant publics; the cyberfeminist, the racially marginalised, the Autistic, the disabled, the queer, and the neuroqueer.

Digital publics and counterpublics offer generative potentialities and joyful co-creation with our technological non-human kin. It is here, in these coded spaces, that creative practice is expanded, folded and unfolded. These folds and expansions have the potential to birth utopic borderless selves and inclusive publics, but only if we, the artists, continue to disrupt, to queer, to creatively speculate and write our own stories.

If the only narratives that surround future technologies are founded in neuronormative and normative bodily experiences, then those the world mark as alien-other will remain othered in the future worlds these technologies construct.

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“It matters what stories make worlds, what worlds make stories.”
‍— Donna Haraway, Staying with the trouble: making kin in the Chthulucene, 2016 (1)