Welcome!
This text unpacks intersections between virtuality and drag that emerged during the making of a VR artwork called Virtual Drag made by Alison Bennett, Megan Beckwith and Mark Payne. Whilst making the work, we realised that drag offers some useful pathways for thinking about virtual reality. The intersections between virtuality and drag stem from ways of speaking about virtual reality as simulation and the drag definition of realness.
This video will discuss the motivations behind the project, how it was made and the impact of the work. We will then unpack the key proposition generated through making the work: what might the drag concept of realness reveal about the structures that constitute virtual reality? As a creative investigation, the VR work was not an illustration of a preconceived theoretical argument or position. The theoretical potential and implications of the work unfolded as the work was made and exhibited.
The discussion will include definitions of virtuality as both emergence and dissolution. We reference Baudrillard’s notion of the collapse of the distinction between the real and the virtual. These ideas are then compared with Drag conceptions of realness. Starting with Butler’s proposition of gender as simulacra, a copy of a copy, drag realness resonates with virtuality, the manifestation of the constructed and contingent frameworks of culture and identity, the liminal vector between ideal and tangible. These propositions surfaced as tangible through making Virtual Drag.
We want to talk about how queer thinking and conceptual ideas about drag can open up interesting possibilities for thinking about virtual reality. We want to think about queering virtual reality not simply in terms of content but also in terms of the processes employed when we make work, the aesthetic and technical choices we make as part of that process. The key proposition that arises out of this case study is that drag offers useful pathways for rethinking structures that constitute virtual reality.
The work we made, titled ‘Virtual Drag’, is a virtual reality experience featuring encounters with 3D scans of drag queen and drag king performers made with photogrammetry. The virtual reality experience goes for about ten minutes and comprises of four scenes built around the personalities of six drag personas. The personas are: the magnificent Philmah Bocks, the divine Art Simone, the knee weakening Transylvanian Gypsy Kings, and Jackie Hammer, who is simply a bit of a hot mess really….
Virtual Drag is a passive VR experience where the viewer takes on the camera point of view and traverses four scenes where they encounter the drag personas. The work was designed for presentation in a gallery with a non-tech literate audience within the constraints of a limited timeframe and budget.
Virtual Drag was a collaborative project by Bennett, Beckwith and Payne that employed an organic process that combined our complementary skills and passions. Alison Bennett is a neuro-queer digital media artist who works in expanded photography. For Virtual Drag, Bennett collaborated with Megan Beckwith, dance choreographer, 3D animator and mixed reality artist; and Mark Payne, an award winning designer and artist working with photogrammetry. The project was funded by the Australian Government through the Australia Council for the Arts, its arts funding and advisory body with assistance from Deakin Motion Lab.
METHODOLOGY
Whilst making Virtual Drag we were guided by Amy Whitaker’s advice that art thinking involves not knowing what the answer will be – that allowing for the awkwardness of failure actually opens up the possibility of creative breakthrough (Whitacker, 2013). We later came to appreciate that, as argued by Halberstam (2011), the label and fear of failure is a form of normative policing. Failure can be harnessed as a queer strategy, the shrugging off of criteria that lead to the repetition of the known. As articulated by David Getsy (2016, p.13), queer is an adjective, a modifier. Queer can be deployed as a strategy that reveals the workings of the power structures of normalcy in the same way that the glitch cracks the hyperreal veneer of digital media to reveal its underlying construction. The arbitrary border become visible when it is not observed.
Indeed, there is no single queer strategy or method. That is the point. It is a diverse range of attitudes and positions that ignore standardising regulation. Ignore may be too strong a word in our case. We sit somewhere between ignore and oblivious, but certainly not ignorant. Having worked in digital media for some time, Virtual Drag was, in part, driven by our frustration at feeling constrained by an established look and process. We were very much aware of what was expected in terms of established procedures and aesthetics for creating 3D digital work but simply could not comprehend the essentialism of the conventions viewed as natural and universal. Some of our colleagues felt that what we were proposing was not technically feasible; that it could not be made to work correctly or look ‘right’. However, we felt that the affordances of the technology offered broader possibilities than the conventional practices within our lab environment allowed.
We will now outline how the work was made and received, before returning to a more detailed discussion of some theoretical implications.
HOW IT WAS MADE
The 3D models of the drag personas were created with digital photogrammetry, a form of expanded photography that builds 3D models from a series of 2D photographs. The photogrammetry process uses the shifts in perspective between each photograph to construct a 3D mesh model of the subject. The surface is constructed from a patchwork of the photographs wrapped around the mesh. We did not erase the somewhat glitchy quality of the photogrammetry models because we were interested in the underlying qualities of this process. Indeed, we feel that there has developed a normative look and style within 3D works that we wanted to rupture. The glitchy qualities of our models, comprised of both the photographic and the incomplete, was part of this investigation.
The models were animated with minimalist choreography by inserting armature that also defied normative conventions of the digital media culture in which we found ourselves at that time. Meshes deformed in odd ways with uncanny stretching of clothing and bodies. Finally, the animated models were placed in a 3D computer game environment that allowed the viewer to look around the virtual environment in real time whilst being guided by a camera path that at times had viewers clutching at the table in front of them! Whilst not wanting to make things hard for the viewer, we did not play it too safe in terms of recommended speeds and angles. Beckwith’s choreographic training came to the fore as we set up a rhythm of encounter that traversed between pleasurable and challenging.
Virtual Drag was presented with the VR headsets resting on white dressing tables. The installation included prints of the unwrapped model textures that reveal something of the process behind the work. Visitors were greeted by one of the artists dressed in a pink apron and invited to sit before the mirror whilst we fitted the VR headset. Many elected to wear the pink feather boa whilst viewing the work.
IMPACT
Virtual Drag was first presented as a ‘premier event’ for the Midsumma queer arts festival in February 2016 exhibited in the studio at Testing Grounds. The launch included live performances; a waacking dance battle, and a runway competition.
The work was then presented at Kingston Arts Centre as part of the Pop Up Lab program organised by Media Lab Melbourne. At Kingston we also had the Transylvanian Gypsy Kings entertain people waiting to use the VR headsets. There was a lovely fission as people came out of the VR experience and found themselves face to face with the drag personas in real life.
- Virtual Drag has since been shown at Storia Salon by VRTOV as part of the Australian International Documentary Conference;
- the Australian Centre for the Moving Image as part of the Melbourne Queer Film Festival; the Kaleidoscope World Tour of cinematic VR;
- The UNIT Festival of queer tech in Berlin;
- Twist360 in Seattle;
- Melt Queer Arts Festival in Brisbane;
- the Videonale festival of video and time based arts at the Kunstmuseum in Bonn, Germany;
- Screen NSW included Virtual Drag on their mobile app 360 Vision;
- It was shown at the Digital Games Research Association Conference at Swinburne University in Melbourne 2017;
- ‘out_of_body‘, curated by Drive-Thru for Thisisit.com;
- CinemaQ: Drag, Shanghai China;
- and the 2017 Encounters Short Film & Animation Festival in Bristol UK.
Virtual Drag generated a small buzz internationally in new media art circles. It was featured on the uber cool UK based blog Prosthetic Knowledge (2015), and picked up by Tumblr Radar. Writing in the The Creators Project, Bruney (2016), declared “virtual reality art gets what it’s sorely been missing – drag queens.” The Creators Project story has was translated into French, Greek and Chinese. The computer game culture magazine Kill-Screen (Priestman, 2016) noted that the convergence of virtual reality and drag realness opened a rabbit hole of accelerating conceptual possibilities. The Kill-Screen article was retweeted by New Inc., the art technology incubator of the New Museum in New York. Motherboard (2016) featured Virtual Drag in their write up of the UNIT Festival in Berlin. We were invited to speak on a panel at South By SouthWest Interactive (2017) about queering virtual reality; and a model of Jackie Hammer was part of The Additivist Cookbook, a compendium of artistic strategies utilizing 3D technology for activism.
WHY MAKE VIRTUAL DRAG?
The project began as a means of exploring the creative potential of photogrammetry in virtual reality. The notion appeared like a bright flash: let’s make 3D scans of drag queens!
The gay rights movement has been characterised by a push back against gender roles and queering the performance of gender. Drag may be the most visible of queer identity performance (ah la Ru Paul’s Drag Race) but we think it is by no means vapid. Drag Queens are the warriors of gay pride.
So much of the early work in virtual reality was driven by naked girls presented for a male gaze. As queer new media artists, we were inspired by artists that queer digital spaces such as Jacolby Satterwhite, a New York based vogue dance artist who presents his performance work in virtual digital spaces, and London based Zach Blas’ Queer Technologies project.
We approached the process of making as an opportunity to attempt to queer virtual reality though our methodology, our use of broken glitch aesthetics and with queer subjects as our content. What we discovered was that drag offers some interesting ways of rethinking virtual reality as a medium. The intersections between virtuality and drag stem from ways of speaking about virtual reality as simulation and the drag definition of realness.
We want to talk theory. We hope you find this as amusing as we do.
SPEAKING ACADEMICALLY
Prompted by a comment on the Prosthetic Knowledge post (2015) about the virtuality of drag and a subsequent conversation with Professor Deb Verhoeven, we began to unpack the concepts of virtual and drag in a bit more detail. It is not our intention to be didactic or declarative. We are more interested in posing questions, playing with possibilities, with opening up poetic resonance and participating in ongoing conversations.
There are fascinating and powerful conjunctions and intersections between the concepts of virtuality and drag persona. These resonances stem from discourses about virtual reality as simulation and simulacra, with the drag definition of realness. Both prompt us to consider the construction of the real.
Returning to our central question, what might the drag concept of realness reveal about the structures that constitute virtual reality?
VIRTUAL
Virtual has several meanings, some relating to virtue and virtuousness, but it slides through notions of quality, as in goodness, to having the quality of something. It has come to relate mostly to similarity: virtually the same; verisimilitude. Whilst the virtual is as old as the media of writing, in digital culture it relates to notions of simulation (imitation of real things) and simulacra (copies of things for which there is no original).
VIRTUAL REALITY
The Oxford English Dictionary dates the term virtual reality from the 1970s and defines it as a “computer-generated simulation of a lifelike environment that can be interacted with in a seemingly real or physical way by a person, … cyberspace.” Now, we do not have the space or time to tackle the notion of reality with any completeness at this point so let us put this out there as a holding point.
We posit that reality is not a fixed concept and its interrogation is one of the driving forces of both art and science. Barad makes the observation that in ancient Greece, “the word ‘real’ first meant just unqualified likeness” (Barad, 2003, p.806). Daniel Rubinstein’s manifesto on 21st century photography (Rubinstein, 2015) traces some of the interations of the relationship between photography and the real, which includes the convergence of the colonial gaze and photography as representation. He concludes that through the practice of digital photography in the twenty first century “… we come to understand that the ‘real world’ is nothing more than so much information plucked out of chaos: the randomised and chaotic conflation of bits of matter, strands of DNA, sub-atomic particles and computer code.”
VIRTUALITY
Virtuality, the dynamic quality of being virtual, takes place in a liminal zone. It is a process of an idealised potential becoming actualised. And here we mean actualised as tangible and perceptible, not necessarily physical. Curiously, the virtual, the quality of virtuality, relates to both emergence and dissolution. It relates to the things that press against the tangible, that are emergent but it also points to the dissolution of the boundary between the ephemeral ideal and that which can be perceived. Part of the attraction of the virtual is the potential for new forms of agency. As formulated by Flusser (Vincs et al, 2014, p.161), new forms of media make new forms of thinking possible. We do not intend to ascribe to the utopian hype of VR but the virtual is inherently idealistic regardless of the media through which it is manifest.
The virtual in this sense is nothing new; its associations with the ultramodern, the digital and life abstracted from the material real are only the present guise of something much older. The virtual is as old as writing itself; it is nothing new, but it drives the new; it is that which compels the generation of thought. (Johnson, 2010, p.217)
Goodrich points to
Baudrillard’s notion of the collapse of the distinction between the real and the virtual… for Baudrillard, the virtual does not indicate a difference across orders, but indeed the complete collapse of orders, so that the real and the virtual become indistinguishable (on an ontological level). For Baudrillard, images have lost their ability to be virtual because a real referent can no longer be distinguished – what once was designated as virtual is now more present than reality itself (or reality is so imbricated with these images that the difference becomes moot). (Goodrich, 2002)
DRAG
As usual, gender theorist Judith Butler wipes the floor with her fierce insight. In the following passage from “Imitation and Gender Insubordination” Butler (1990) argues there is no original gender expression. She positions gender as simulacra, a copy of a copy. Heterosexual gender is also performative but seeks to position itself as original. The performance of drag reveals these structures.
Drag is not the putting on of a gender that belongs properly to some other group, i.e. an act of expropriation or appropriation that assumes that gender is the rightful property of sex, that “masculine” belongs to “male” and “feminine” belongs to “female”. There is no “proper” gender, a gender proper to one sex rather than another, which is in some sense that sex’s cultural property. Where the notion of the “proper” operates, it is always and only improperly installed as the effect of a compulsory system. Drag constitutes the mundane way in which genders are appropriated, theatricalized, worn, and done; it implies that all gendering is a kind of impersonation and approximation. If this is true, it seems, there is no original or primary gender that drag imitates, but gender is a kind of imitation that produces the very notion of the original as an effect and consequence of the imitation itself. (Butler, 1990, p.339)
Drag is not a simulation or appropriation of an original and proper gender but a joyful critique and celebration, a copy of a copy of a copy, a sly knowing wink, a profoundly queer insertion in the complex becoming of identity. This could be extrapolated to virtual reality as a critique of realness.
REALNESS
Jennie Livingston’s documentary Paris is Burning on the 1980s New York drag ballroom scene introduced mainstream audiences to the concept of drag realness. Queer theorist Tim Dean expands:
For the characters in Paris is Burning realness is the ultimate accolade, since this term denotes the degree of successful imitation produced by a gender performance. As an effect of scrupulously accurate mimesis, realness is in some sense the social or subcultural equivalent of the aesthetic category of realism. Literary critics such as Roland Barthes have argued for the concept of a “reality effect” as undercutting the aesthetic of realism by showing how pre-representational reality – to whose faithful imitation the transparency of realist representation aspires – is itself the effect of highly complex and artificial rhetorical codes. Similarly, gender critics such as Butler argue that drag realness undermines the ontological or existential status of every identity, especially gender identity, by showing the imitative and fictive structure of identity – and thence of everything reality. Realness reveals social reality as a construct, something fabricated. (Dean, 2000, p.69)
Drag realness resonates with virtuality, the manifestation of the constructed and contingent frameworks of culture and identity, the liminal transit or vector between ideal and tangible. It is both superficial and core. Which is fabulous!
Now, we are not saying that gender expression is inauthentic, arbitrary or fake. Butler’s point is that gender is performative, that it is manifest through re-enactment and reproduction. Indeed, gender expression is a process, a transition, a becoming. What we are saying is gender expression does not belong exclusively to any particular group or classification.
IN CONCLUSION…
What does the drag concept of realness reveal about the structures that constitute virtual reality?
As we said, we are not seeking to make didactic statements about the Virtual Drag project. Our purpose here is to articulate starting points and foundations. These ideas were developed through the making of the project, not a means of presenting already resolved positions. Indeed, we make work as a means of posing questions because we have yet to grasp something. Through the process of making and exhibiting this work, we are exploring the potentials of the relationship between drag and virtual. Not only is this an opportunity to consider how virtuality might reflect upon gender but, perhaps even more interestingly, how might the drag notion of realness and the practice of drag offer fresh perspectives on the cultural production of virtual reality. In serving realness, virtual reality troubles the experience of reality, just as drag troubles the essentialist construction of gender as contingent on a network of shifting and emergent circumstances and processes.
Perhaps reality is the problem (reality is always the problem, darling!). The use of the term reality in virtual reality is aspirational. Virtual reality media aspires to create the experience of a present reality but it is not really reality. Whilst the brain instinctively responds to stereoscopic images as ‘real’, we still know it is a mediated experience (Dsouza, 2012, p.14). Perhaps we could call it virtual media but all media are virtual. The distinctive feature of this medium is its immersive qualities – even more so than cinema. The headset removes peripheral intrusion and the loss of the fixed frame gives the viewer a degree of agency. Immersive media may be a more accurate label (Friedberg, 2006, p.11). If drag performance reveals gender identity as performative and emergent, through the making of Virtual Drag, we were prompted to rethink VR experiences as a form of becoming in mediation, of performing emergent potential. Just as it proposes to replicate or mimic reality, the experience of virtual reality as a medium fundamentally reveals that it is a performance of something uncertain. Virtual reality has been premised on the assumption that reality is a fixed and stable aspiration. As theorised by Butler and Dean, gender is just one example of how phenomena are manifested through repeated practice and experience. Rubinstein and Baudrillard point to the unfixedness of the real original. We propose that these ideas may be usefully extended to frameworks for thinking through the construction of virtual reality as a media paradigm.
Really, it’s all a bit of a drag.
References
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AUTHOR BIOS:
Alison Bennett