On Trans Game History: Networked Games, Glitches, Trans Studies, and the Digital

Name: On Trans Game History: Networked Games, Glitches, Trans Studies, and the Digital
Start: 2022-04-11T16:30:00-04:00
End: 2022-04-11T18:00:00-04:00

April 11, 2022 @
4:30 p.m. - 6:00 p.m. Eastern Time

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On Trans Game History: Networked Games, Glitches, Trans Studies, and the Digital

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image of television and vintage video game console — Image of the living room space from “Digital TV Breakfast” (2018), with the original “Digital TV Dinner” (1978) playing on the television, alongside the Bally Astrocade home computer and game console. “Digital TV Breakfast” is a digital interactive art piece made in Unity and originally designed for the art exhibition Chicago New Media 1973-1992 curated by Jon Cates with assistance from Chaz Evans and Jonathan Kinkley, which was on display at Gallery 400 in Chicago and at Ars Electronica in Linz, Austria. “Digital TV Breakfast” responds to and remediates the first-ever piece of digital video glitch art, “Digital TV Dinner,” made by Jamie Faye Fenton, Raul Zaritsky, and Dick Ainsworth in 1978.

This talk by Whitney (Whit) Pow (they/them) of New York University situates today’s queer and trans games movement within the histories, contributions, and politics of queer and trans people and people of color from the 1970s to the present. How might we re-think and re-imagine the radical potentiality of video games by centering game studies on queer and trans life, history, and experience? And how might queer game studies change the way we understand what games are, what they do, and what they can be for LGBTQ+ communities?

Admission is free and open to the public. All audience members are expected to comply with Clark University’s most current vaccination and masking policies. Those who cannot attend in person are invited to join the live stream:

https://clarku.zoom.us/j/94880871791
Webinar ID: 948 8087 1791

Sponsored by the Higgins School of Humanities and the Women’s and Gender Studies Program at Clark University

About the Speaker

Whitney (Whit) Pow (they/them) is an Assistant Professor in the Department of Media, Culture, and Communication at New York University. Pow’s research focuses on queer and trans histories of video games, glitches, software, and computational media. Their current book project locates transgender video game designers and programmers in histories of early software and hardware development, looking at the intersection of queer and trans medical history, surveillance, and policy with computer and video game history.