— In 2019 I received a fellowship with the Curating and Public Scholarship Lab at Сoncordia University, which researches and reimagines the future of museums and exhibition spaces through a lens of inclusion, accessibility, and diversity. Over six months, we developed an exhibition and public programming project which was called Queering the Map: ON SITE that took place at Fourth Space, an exhibition center at Concordia University in Montreal. And when I proposed this project for the fellowship, I framed it through the question: What happens if we leaked the contents of this digital platform Queering the Map into a physical location?

Through the process of building this exhibition, myself and Alex Robichaud, the fellowship administrator, began framing the physical exhibition as a sort of trojan horse, or an excuse, for creating a robust public programming offering that would bring people into the space through different activations, like performances, workshops, a dance program, as well as lots of shared meals. using arts funding to do so. As a result, most of our energy and our budget went into inviting queer and trans community builders and artists and designers into the space to give workshops. A few examples: Neema Githere gave a workshop on thinking about love as a technology and what that would mean in terms of how we interact with each other and how we interact with the world if we think about love as a verb. Jose Richard Aviles, an urban planner and social worker based in Los Angeles, gave a workshop on mapping the body through dance, thinking about the body as a map and dancing as a form of cartography. Jacqueline Beaumont, who is a bio-artist in Montreal, gave a workshop on thinking beyond the human in the context of mapping and gave a workshop on building interspecies connections through meditation practice. rudi aker, an artist, designer, and curator, gave a workshop on thinking about mapping through beadwork and what it means to bead a map.

One of the things that came up as we were both planning the exhibition and as it happened in real time, was interrogating the meaning of the word community. Especially what does queer community mean in the context of a digital platform that is so vast and that there's contributors from every single continent and in multiple different languages. And one curatorial guideline that we had for ourselves was starting first from my networks: my actual friends and community and people that had informed my thinking around what Queering the Map is and what it can do. Rather than posting a call out inviting people that I didn't know, we decided to invite people that I had personal and deep relationships with to become a part of public programming. The benefit of that was that the workshops, the space itself and the people that came to the space were invited into existing networks of queer kinship rather than starting from scratch entirely. It was a beautiful starting point for broadening our networks together because it was already rooted in care. And the result of that was that there were quite a number of people that came to every single workshop or multiple workshops. And then the feelings that are produced from being in relation to that particular group of people, the kinds of knowledge that was being shared inevitably has ripples out into the world. In that way – on the microscale of the exhibition – we absolutely accomplished the goal of building a space of temporary queer community.

We also thought a lot about what it meant to be good hosts. We always had a lot of food available; people were coming in and going into the kitchen in the exhibition space and helping themselves. It really sort of breaks down the barrier between “this is an exhibition space” versus “this is a space where we're trying to carve out a temporary queer community center”.

— On a technical level, QT.bot is composed of two databases: a text database of the submissions from Queering the Map, and an image database of the Google Maps Street View images corresponding to tagged coordinates on Queering the Map. I trained an implementation of OpenAI’s GPT-2 text database on the text database, and a StyleGAN on the image database. QT.bot is the outcome of integrating these two machine learning models to produce speculative narratives of queer and trans life, and images of the environments in which they might occur.

QT.bot emerged out of a reticence towards the academic urge to ‘make sense’ of the data of Queering the Map, an anxiety around using it to make deterministic claims about queer and trans life. This felt contradictory to the initial aim of the platform, which was to increase the multiplicity of how we think about what constitutes queer and trans space and experience.

And so rather than using data analysis tools like machine learning to make deductive conclusions, I was interested in using those tools to make inductive openings; to make more from the data rather than trying to compress it, or make it more easily digestible.

The speculative stories that are published so far are working with all the data that has been moderated and approved. That means both stories that are positive and stories that are negative, and everything in between. Future parts of the models that I'm working on right now are trying to work with specific sections of the data and thinking about what happens when it's rooted in specific locations or sentiments, and how the tenor and syntax of QT.bot’s storytelling changes.

I had been exploring machine learning tools in the context of arts practice and was interested in the kinds of resonances that these tools have with queer and trans life: failure, glitch, the unreal quality that machine learning models are able to create. This felt pertinent given the histories and presents of queer and trans life being cast as unreal or invalid: ie. queerness as a phase, transness as a falsehood.

Through these explorations, I became particularly fascinated with the moments in which the stories failed to make sense. And in their failing to make sense, opened up new kinds of possibilities for language and for thinking about queerness as a form of relationality that breaks or finds new forms in and through its actions. Rather than working with an output that ‘passes’ as a real story, I am interested in what happens in the break, what happens in the collapse of combining all these voices into discordant unison. That is one line of inquiry I have been exploring through QT.bot.

The second is more auto-theoretical, in terms of trying to express the sense of overwhelm that is my experience of stewarding this platform and moderating all these stories that come from so many different contexts and emotional valences. The way these stories move through me – because I've read so many of them – is disjointed. They're ecstatic, and they're depressive, it's a sort of bipolar extravaganza. There’s no way for me to make some sort of definitive claim about what is happening, how people are writing, what people are feeling on the platform. It is extremely overwhelming. And working with QT.bot felt like the most articulate expression of my impression of QtM’s database – articulate through its non-articulate nature.

— The way that I think about queer futurity is indebted to queer scholar of color José Esteban Muñoz, who is working with the ideas of Ernst Bloch, a scholar from the Frankfurt School, around concrete utopias and abstract utopias. Bloch defines an abstract utopia as something that is not grounded in the conditions of the present. Conversely, a concrete utopia is a form of utopia that is grounded in the context and knowledge of the past and present. Queering the Map is a platform about history, about shared experience and thinking about our own past and present in conjunction with those of our communities and beyond them. These histories are a necessary starting point if we are to imagine the kinds of futures that we want and we can concretely move towards.

QT.bot is perhaps a more explicit articulation of queer forms of futurity. I guess it would also be important to note that when I think about futurity, I don't necessarily think of it as something that's emerging linearly from the present, but rather possibilities that are splintering from the present in multiple directions, in 360 degrees.