ABSTRACT

Meta’s announcement of Horizon Worlds has been considered the metaverse’s launching, but artists, scholars, researchers, and users (among others) have been exploring virtual and extended realities for a long time now. The same cyber-feminist movement meant to tech culture during the first years of the text-based internet, the same queer-feminist artists are facing by counter-imagining Zuckerberg’s metaverse. By conducting a close reading analysis of five VR/AR art pieces by queer and feminist artists – Danielle Brathwaite-Shirley’s Resurrection Lands (2021), Jacolby Satterwhite’s Domestika (2017), micha cárdenas’ Sin Sol/No Sun (2018), Pete Jiadong Qiang’s Vampyroteuthis Infernalis (2020), and Tabitha Nikolai’s Sick Trans-sex Gloria (2017) – this chapter aims to demonstrate how queer virtual world-making is imagining the metaverse otherwise while developing new tools to critically analyse its hegemonic, capital-oriented versions.

Keywords: queer, metaverse, contemporary art, Virtual Reality

You can read the chapter here.