I have entered new forms to investigate self, to disseminate, to contract, to thrust, to play, to subvert, disrupt, detract, resist, to exist, to fag the whole thing up.

This semester has led to big shifts in my practice. At first, I worked on translating the environments from UNGENDER (2025) into a VR experience: UNGENDER (LOADING…) (2025) (figure 1). To be completely honest it was boring. I think it does work better in VR but shit that took so long and it was still missing something. Enter SUCK MY FEMININE (2025) (figure 2). I feel that UNGENDER was too passive when I think about queer voice, my voice and my queerness and transness, I realise I wasn't looking to invite in a greater audience. I wanted to obscure and be abstract, yet I feel I failed in this regard. I have been led into institutional queerness, which makes palatable, makes one-dimensional, it attempts to lay flat queerness for the cisgender heteronormative (white) dominating class…

it is erasure.

Queerness is not something to be (or even can be) contained. Queerness and transness are a multiplicity, my non-binary existence is not for you to digest, it is to be choked on, to spread, to expand, to rupture. It is also joy, resistance, agency, belonging and becoming. I don't wish to be comprehended. And so, I am considering more who my audience is. Who are the virtual spaces I create for? And what am I doing back in the institution, a constrictive, flattening environment. Can or should queer research exist in this siloed world of the university?

How can I create rupture and usurp the binary?

SUCK MY FEMININE had mixed reactions, it was polarising. I was ecstatic. It is the first time I have truly felt excited about my own artwork. I am locating my voice. The shift interestingly has been through incorporating music production and meme culture. I have been sick of trying to formalise (as I am now), to be serious. Realising the unserious has value. Queerness has and does exist within the underground, within the low-brow: ballroom, drag, club culture, pornography, underground/ b-grade film and art, internet subcultures and cyberspaces. It is not to say we shouldn't have a place here but to say that I am frustrated with the forcing of positionality in a system that isn't made for us. To placate. To benefit that system. Witnessing a pearl-clutching moment (when a white cis het person is offended) to SUCK MY FEMININE was thrilling. Beside this, there were fellow queers being vocal about their queerness, something I had not seen much of in this cohort until this critique. The kind of immersion I realise I am seeking is the opening of space, expanding queerness and queer voice for myself and my community. We create space rather than fit into one. And finding how and where my virtual works engage with real space is in this slippage, in that rupture.

As may be evident thus far, I have been considering the practical applications or expansions of Legacy Russel's Glitch Feminism: A Manifesto (2020) [1]. Since having the opportunity to take Dr Xanthe Dobbie's class Glitch and Malfunction, I have been challenged with positing glitch as a subject in my practice and prompt into exploring queer theory. I have on and off engaged with Glitch Feminism and wanted to further unpack and delve into its applications within my practice. I wanted to consider more on the shift into avatars, my focus on creating virtual bodies. For a long time, my practice had focused on digital environment building, I avoided figures for the fear of unifying and flattening virtuality and virtual existence to a body. Now, my mind has lingered on Legacy Russel's words:

"We use "body" to give material form to an idea that has no form, an assemblage that is abstract" [1].

Existing as a singular vessel in the AFK meat world (reality) is restricting and often made difficult to customize. This world is limiting and offers little.

"We want new skin" [1].

And so, we will create it.

Virtual space, the internet, cyber realms become both escapism from flesh prisons and opportunity and agency to expand, to become, more.

It makes me think of Lu Yang's DOKU [2] and Harriet Davey's Whowle [3], these are virtual selves, extensions of the artists, and are also never a singular extension. They appear as OC's that are altered, and ever-changing forms, they are a point of entry into their worlds. I have spoken with my supervisor Lewis Gittus about what the entry point is for my work, into a potential metafiction in cyberspace. I think at this point I don't have a specific entry point, but I am very interested in his notion toward a metafiction or metaverse across practice, whereby the works I create become pieces of something larger.

UNGENDER (LOADING…) was built around giving the audience a virtual body inside the VR space. A humanoid figure I created using Blender and Daz3D (open-source 3D programs). There was a glitch in translating this into 360 video, causing the camera perspective to be both inside and outside of this body. This glitch led to a fairly accurate reading in the critique where the audience often described a sense of being and non-being, and something beyond a bodily existence. They existed as multiple at once. I can't say this was a universal reading, there were numerous audience members frustrated at the lack of legibility of the body and especially of the spoken words in the audio. Clinging to sounds and phrases that did not make sense to them. I recorded myself reading out a stream of consciousness text I had written on the prompt of self-image, self-portraiture, a slightly incoherent ramble on non-binary existence, a poem. I did not include subtitles and even utilised a subwoofer to increase the bass in my voice and heighten the background ambient track to further blur the words. The words are important, but I don't believe they need to be clear. I feel my point was met by the desperate need to flatten, to make sense, to be coherent and understandable from a singular point, by the audience. This is where I began to acknowledge something missing from the work. I was being quiet. Yes, attempting to be abstract, to be indecipherable. It also felt like muting my queerness.

This entry was intended as a starting point, what would later become the loading zone or entry of a future, more interactive work, a playable experience. I am sure Lewis Gittus can attest to the fact I have mentioned this plan over and over and over…

To be fair it would take a great deal of time to develop what I had in mind, an expansive network of virtual worlds to explore in 3D space, potentially even in VR. The main wall though had been experiencing a lack of experimentation in my practice. Entering Glitch and Malfunction provided an opportunity to reflect practically on my studio projects where I could reengage, remix, and hack my own creations. I took elements from different works, certain 3D models, textures, environments, and tried to break down the pieces that concoct the larger immersive spaces I had been developing for studio.  From this, what I fed back into studio practice was the need for more. To expand into physical space. I experimented with a different installation format with a focus on screens. This led to the SUCK MY FEMININE installation, 8-channel screen installation (and stereo speakers). Compared to UNGENDER (LOADING…) this install felt more intentional, I had tried to add to the VR set up to create an external immersive environment, but it was fairly haphazard. I wanted to work with screens more and figured the easiest way to do an expansive install was to lay an array of LCD screens flat on the floor. Ideally in future, I would like to take my supervisor's advice on creating a scaffolding structure for screen displays, maybe trying other modes of installation with screens. For the purpose of creating multi-channel installations that are more or less easy to navigate (especially with difficulty and push back on spaces within the university for installing) it worked well.

The audiovisual components of this project are really where my focus was, and I wanted that to remain in focus with creating an install. 9 videos total: 8 animations and 1 text screen (with animated features) that appeared before each video played. These are arbitrary numbers; I actually wanted more but I already stress out the AV staff enough. Something I learned by taking on an elective subject was making then thinking, making something exist first before you analyse or change anything, this allowed me to work quickly and challenge myself to experiment and play with visual builds. Basically, the idea was to create many digital bodies and environments as little pockets into virtual worlds.

I have been thinking a lot about how I position femininity as an AFAB non-binary person and thought back to how I grew up with strained connection to girlhood. The details of this are irrelevant, with the main consideration being femme, reframing gendered notions of the feminine within my queerness and transness. Going back to the idea of creating an expansive virtual world, I was first considering the central hub of this, the entry point, to be my bedroom or my imagined bedroom, somewhere I would reside in this cyber realm. Feeling nostalgic about early internet experiences (some of them anyway), Myspace and blog era, where we created web pages that represented us, they were our homepages so-to-speak, where we resided online as a base. I thought of them as bedrooms, where people get to express themselves without being physically perceived (as a body), decorated as an extension of their interests, parts of who they are. Could I create renewed cyber realms with this framework in mind? Potentially a larger project in there. Of course, this didn't need to be a conventional room but spaces where the virtual bodies I made were at home, in their own worlds, mainly because an actual bedroom seemed quite boring for this. I took inspiration from later extensions from the Myspace era such as Meez and Second Life, PSX video games such as Cruelty Squad (in terms of visual aesthetics) [4] and digital artists that reflect this mid-early internet period: Nohygiene [5]. Nohygiene takes direct influence from the Myspace and Deviant Art iconography of the Emo angel girl figure (if you were there you know the one, prolific imagery at the time). Looking back into early web virtual culture, I wanted to draw from contemporary queer meme culture too, which in itself references this early subculture visual language. The text piece in SUCK MY FEMININE is a combination of similar stream of consciousness writing mentioned before, and phrases and language from queer memes. Returning to this idea of valuing the unserious, bringing in elements of humour, and play have become important in my practice. These memes are their own queer codes, for cyberspace. In considering voice and language in studio, how transparent or opaque my messaging is, incorporating queer meme codes felt like a natural progression into signalling to the intended audience. During the critique this became very clear between the cishet and the LGBTQIA+ members responding positively or negatively. The music was an extension of the text, initially I had considered reading out the whole text and incorporating in it as lyrics but landed on the repeated and distorted recording saying, "GIRL FAGGING IT UP".

I get called girl a lot

…a lot.

 Although there is a 'she' mentioned in my pronouns, it is long down the list. Yet it is unsurprising how some of you latch onto it like it's your God-given right to decide my identity, for your comfort. I want it back. It isn't yours. So hereon I will introduce myself as the genderqueer girlfag, enby freak, transie cyborg, cyber cunt.

Girlfag yes but girl no.

I've made music for a long time but never incorporated it into my art practice. This entry was inspired by artists ARCA and Onlyfire. ARCA is a prolific musician and inspired much of my early beginnings into music production. Her track (and the video by Frederick Heyman) Nonbinary (2020) speaks volumes on queer existence, it was a kind of manifesto to me, and a new consideration on using voice in art and music without the need to explain or be transparent, or palatable [6]. If you want to 'get' nonbinary/trans experience, here you go. Onlyfire having become a kind of online sensation, a queer anthem creator, entered my feed more recently with tracks such as Moana Lisa (2024) [7]. Onlyfire uses an automated Siri-like voice speaking hyper-sexual lyrics over drum and bass electronic tracks, thoroughly unserious fun queer club vibes. Maybe you can hear that direct influence in SUCK MY FEMININE.

It's playful. This feels like what I have been missing.

I have been reading Allucquére Rosanne Stone's article Sex and Death Among the Disembodied: VR, Cyberspace, and the Nature of Academic Discourse, as I made this project, thinking around ideas of "work that is about play" [8]. Granted they were speaking to the profession of sex work but also spoke to immersive virtual space and embodied experience. The example being phone sex, using technology, using voice, as extensions of the body and providing an illusion of physical contact. It made me think about the importance of play and the spectrum of immersion as technology has shifted, the levels of escapism and new experiences through the virtual, how bodies are translated and transformed.

Creating cyber realms still feels like the core of this larger research project, and believe my next move is branching out into internet-based experience. In criticizing the issue of siloed information, I must also critique myself and my practice in considering accessibility and expanding shared knowledge. If these spaces are for the fags, then it belongs in the underground, the gutter world of the web, my home.

I want cyberized limbs and low poly tits

I belong in the cipher, undecipherable

I exist between pixels

Non-binary through binary

I grew up on the internet, and I will die on the internet. Reincarnate new forms of digital flesh and code. Selves upon selves.

I wonder are others' selves are included too. Does only my voice exist in this cyber realm of mine?

I think about Danielle Braithwaite-Shirley's practice, their HTML games. Recently I have been playing/experiencing Black Trans Revolution (2024) [9], Black Trans Archive (2022) [10], and When Our Worlds Meet (2023) [11]. There is a dual embodied experience between being welcomed in as a trans person and simultaneously being aware of my whiteness in entering these virtual spaces as a listener and a visitor. Braithwaite-Shirley is very upfront about this, very direct in addressing who is entering their worlds. I want to be clear about my intentions and directions within and in creating queered cyberspaces. Without getting bogged down by outlines. The virtual is to be expanded into not constricted. I think of VNS Matrix Corpus Fantastica (MOO), a text-based online game where people participate in creating virtual worlds [12]. There are downsides to this kind of open collaboration, how much is moderated, how much is free, who gets to be in the space, is that policed, should it be? Factoring in interactivity may be a challenge with these considerations. I think returning to the idea of a metafiction across practice, could allow me to think about worldbuilding and what the audience's role is in entering these spaces, how they can be engaged with whether its exploratory or in a way of meaning-making. Looking at Braithwaite-Shirley's practice has especially brought these ideas up where they explore numerous gameplay modes, with densely built worlds as a form of storytelling and as embodied experiences, which reflect real-world lived experience yet still are abstract and surreal in ways. These examples make me think about game development within contemporary art also as a mode of archive and video essay explorations. I think this is where my current world-building sits within or where I would like it to be. These expansive perspectives on virtual world building are my considerations moving forward.

It's giving I'm going to make a cunty manifesto with virtual worlds in worlds for faggy cyberspace.

Genderqueer Girlfag/Enby Freak/Transie Cyborg/Cyber Cunt out.

ANGEL MAGGOT <3

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1. Legacy Russell, Glitch Feminism: A Manifesto (Verso, 2020), http://ebookcentral.proquest.com/lib/rmit/detail.action?docID=6297948.

2. Yang Lu, DOKU-LuYang’s Digital Reincarnation – LUYANG.ASIA, n.d., accessed November 14, 2025, http://luyang.asia/2020/11/20/doku-luyangs-digital-reincarnation/.

3. Harriet Davey, “Harriet Davey (@harriet.Blend) • Instagram Photos and Videos,” Instagram, October 1, 2025, https://www.instagram.com/harriet.blend/.

4. Cruelty Squad for PC, Consumer Softproducts, released 16 June, 2021. https://store.steampowered.com/app/1388770/Cruelty_Squad/.

5. "Nohygiene", Instagram, 2025, accessed 5 October 2025, https://www.instagram.com/nohygiene/.

6. ARCA, "Nonbinary", Directed by Frederick Heyman. 1 May 2020, YouTube video, 02:19, accessed 23 October 2025, https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=gfGz4MTQ28I.

7.  Onlyflire, "Moana Lisa". 23 March 2024, YouTube video (audio), 03:04, accessed 4 November 2025, https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=_f9DxDU3vzw.

8. Allucquére Rosanne Stone, “Sex and Death among the Disembodied: VR, Cyberspace, and the Nature of Academic Discourse,” The Sociological Review 42, no. 1 (1994): 243–55, https://doi.org/10.1111/j.1467-954X.1994.tb03419.x.

9. Danielle, Braithwaite-Shirley, Black Trans Revolution: I Can't Follow You Anymore, 2024. HTML Unity game. Source: Black Trans Revolution, accessed 9 September 2025. https://www.blacktransrevolution.com/.

10. Danielle, Braithwaite-Shirley, Black Trans Archive, 2024. HTML Unity game. Source: Black Trans Archive, accessed 9 September 2025. https://blacktransarchive.com/.

11. Danielle, Braithwaite-Shirley, When Our Worlds Meet, 2022. HTML Unity game. Source When Our Worlds Meet, accessed 9 September 2025, http://whenourworldsmeet.com/. ​

12. VNS MATRIX, “Corpusfantastica MOO ⁄ VNS Matrix,” VNS Matrix, January 16, 2018, https://vnsmatrix.net/projects/corpusfantastica-moo-and-lambda-projects.