Week 3 – Disrupting a binary system

We got quite a broad prompt again this week. As such, I placed much less emphasis on research this time and more on the development of an end piece.

Disrupting a binary

RESEARCH

My thought process behind this wasn’t to look outwards and research what a problem like this could entail, but rather, inwards. I felt like I already found the answer in my experiences – i’m a non-binary person in an excessively binary space.

There’s nothing clear cut about my gender, and I still don’t know if I have it perfectly figured out. See, in the real world outside of binary, it’s okay to be a logic error like this. All I’m properly firm on is that I go by he/him pronouns at this time. I could be loosely described as transmasculine. My research really only pertained to tapping into my experiences as a transmasc of colour navigating a tech space of which I am extremely underrepresented – even within the queer and transgender community inside computer science. I have never seen anyone like myself in this field whatsoever.

To evaluate my more humanities focused research – If i was to revisit this very post, I would find other trans men or transmasculine creative practicioners and include them in this research. Also, Jazmin reccomended me the book Glitch Feminism by Legacy Russell which was also a resource for this week’s task. I have just bought the book and am looking forward to investigating more resources written by queer POC about technology and tech spaces.

In terms of a chosen art style for this piece, I took a lot of inspiration from a little indie animation project called Brawler’s World, a 3D web series. It’s categorised by clunky, low poly lego – like models combined with a rough and grainy rendering style, borrowing its own stylistic choices from iconic late 90’s and early 2000’s video games like Jet Set Radio and Wipeout. Here are some examples.

PROCESS

In looking inwards, I’ll give a little contex into my life. Recently I’ve been socially transitioning more and more, and so recently I’ve finally been able to get a hold of some TransTape which is a safe binding system – something I’ve never had access to before. I filmed myself putting it on for the first time just for personal reasons, and so in the work I created I made use of the footage and cut it down and spliced it together.

I used a pose from the end of the video as the base for a 3D art piece for my outcome.

The video i recorded already had some interesting audio, specifically when i was listening to SOPHIE, so I kept some of it in.

After spending some time relearning Blender, I then made a 3D model based off of this image, copying the Brawlers World cartoony style, like when I drew the face and the tape textures super crudely to save time.