In their experimental animated dance work Be Vardų, Be Kojų' , Brigita Gedgaudas transforms photograms of traditional Lithuanian folk dancers into glitched digital forms. These forms are then choreographed into new expressions of the original dance, moving and transforming in ways which only the digital can. An overlaid digital voice speaks to the viewer throughout the performance, triumphantly proclaiming its many dimensions, which extend beyond the human, the physical, and the conventional. The combined impact of this is a uniquely queer expression of dance, history, body, and space. It’s also more than a little unnerving.

But unnerving in tantalizing ways; ways which hint at forms of play, self, place, and freedom that one isn’t used to, or ready for. It is uncanny in the purest sense, both perfectly recognizable and yet perfectly strange. Every pixel, every motion, every word, originates from our world and its traditions and limitations, and yet reconfigured they could not feel more alien. Could not more loudly proclaim their pride at BEING alien. The viewer is confronted with (not presented, confronted) with something at once old and new. New expressions of recognized forms, bodies, genders, and hierarchies. New expressions which are not detached from tradition, but merely unbound from tradition’s strict linearity. Allowed to move on axes not before accessible, and with little regard for temporality.

In the last article we discussed the idea of queering the machine, a process which is on full display in Be Vardų, Be Kojų', and which Gedgaudas has articulated both more clearly and more subtly than I could have ever hoped to in the faltering, tentative words of that article. The piece perfectly exemplifies the simultaneous in-your-face directness and near-infinite complexity which the digital so thoroughly excels at. If you’ve read that article, and haven’t yet watched Gedgaudas’ piece, I implore you to do so now.

What I want to do this week is explore that twinge of uncanny fear which this piece invokes, and to place it within a fuller context. One in which the queer and the digital have unexpectedly been overlapping for many decades.

A classic trope of sci-fi, which found its most clear expressions in the 80s through the mid 90s, but which has never left us, is that of the machine uprising. Master Controller from Tron, SkyNet from the (regrettably still ongoing) Terminator franchise, the ‘shall we play a game?’ computer from War Games, and on and on. It’s old hat at this point, and an overabundance of words have already been written about the underlying cultural anxieties which spawned it.

There has likewise been written great volumes about the anxieties at the core of queerphobia. And while both of these discourses contain no shortage of brilliant, essential works by many talented and thoughtful people, I believe that there is a facet to both fears which share a common root, and which I have not yet seen anyone touch upon. Specifically, the fear not of replacement, or infiltration, or subjugation, or even corruption, but instead of unprecedented liberation.

In their original artist statement about their work, Gedgaudas said the following:

‘Be Vardų, Be Kojų' asks humans to shed the skin that ties them to specific perceptions of themselves and embody the glitch. In this way, the digital realm reaches out to ask how humans can reinvent themselves and their traditions.’

It asks humans to shed their skin. And not just their skin, but the underlying bones of their most thoroughly entrenched practices and beliefs. To reconsider, from the ground up, not only the particulars of these things, but their most basic essential makeup. To recognize a space in which all assumptions have been excised, and where tradition and expectation are free to play and dance along every axis, and then to explain that space in the face of their own certainty. Gedgaudas’ work asks this, Queerness asks this, and the Digital asks this. At least, they do in their purest and most radical forms.

Queerness and the (capital d) Digital beg questions of us which most are not yet equipped to answer. Questions about gender, information, sexuality, hierarchy, language, technology, the future and more. But all questions which can ultimately be reduced to a singular ur-question: ‘Why are we like this?’

Why are we, our culture, the structure we impose upon the world, the way they are? Do they need to be? And when confronted (there’s that word again) with this, most people want desperately to be able to answer ‘Because, and yes of course.’ And in the absence of other modes, of newer or overlooked or more anarchic expressions, they are allowed to do so. They are allowed to tell stories of the evil machines and the wicked queers, and then point to their own stories and say ‘see? That’s why!’

But at the convergence of a truly Radical Queerness, and a fully Liberated Digital, there exists the potential for expressions too transformative, too uncanny, too unbound by the axes of tradition and temporality, to be woven back into existing narratives. And that is the true uprising which we fear. The one which exists beyond what can be recuperated or vilified, and which asks, firmly but gently, and in boisterous, jubilant tones, ‘Why are we like this? Must we be?’ and which leaves no room for any answer but ‘I don’t know.’

And as much as we, collectively as a culture, have been conditioned and incentivised at all levels to avoid such answers. As much as we have been trained to treat the very question like a threat; to see the potential for our own liberation from history, tradition, and hierarchy as a fate worse than death. Ultimately, despite all of that, the radically, digitally, queer expression which we will be faced with, and which Be Vardų, Be Kojų' exemplifies, could not be less threatening. Because all that it is truly aksing, when it dares us to shed our skin, to tear down our walls and limitations, to become unbound, and to dance a glitched dance, is this:

Shall we play a game?