ABSTRACT
This article explores how masculinity assemblages are composed within postdigital youth landscapes where gender is in a state of epistemic crisis and the digital is assumed to operate primarily as a coercive force. Building on queer and feminist posthuman praxis, we conceptualize the postdigital through Laura Marks’ information fold alongside Celia Lury’s notion of platformization and problem space where we share a compositional methodology that treats methods as generative practices that surface and transform problems in their becoming. Our analysis draws on three arts-informed projects with children and young people (ages 9–18) that used talking, writing, drawing, poetry, sculpting and film. We get creative with manipulation as man-i-pulation across three information folds: an altright ‘algo-rhythm’, a government hashtag campaign and feminist instapoetry. Together, they explore how masculinities are unstable, pliable, multiply entangled and always in motion. We go on to show how such data, re-created in moments of connection with multiple audiences, can come to resonate as posthuman participants beyond the fieldwork encounter. Postdigital information folds, animated through creative praxis, open resource-full spaces for unpredictability, invention, and transformation.
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Abstract
This article focuses on what bodies know yet which cannot be expressed verbally. We started with a problem encountered during conventional interviewing in an ex-mining community in south Wales when some teen girls struggled to speak. This led us to focus on the body, corporeality and movement in improvisational dance workshops. By slowing down and speeding up video footage from the workshops, we notice movement patterns and speculate about how traces of gender body-movement practices developed within mining communities over time become actualised in girls’ habitual movement repertoires. Inspired by the works of Gilles Deleuze, Felix Guattari and Erin Manning, a series of cameos are presented: room dancing; the hold; the wiggle; the leap and the dance of the not-yet. We speculate about relations between the actual movements we could see, the in-act infused with the history of place, and the virtual potential of movement.
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These freaks and weirdos are literally fucking insane.
