I’ve made a zine for display at the STRAP UP transmasc erotic art exhibition and performance night on 23rd October at SEESAW in Manchester. It’s a satirical dystopian sci-fi piece, that takes place in a near-future datacentre which runs on human bodyminds instead of graphics cards. Sadly, I can’t go to the event myself, but it looks like an incredible night!
SEESAW
86 Princess Street, Manchester, M1 6NG (view map)
Granted, a project by Caroline Sinders and Romy Gal el Rab, is now a 2026 Lumen Prize finalist. I carried out narrative design for this project, incorporating research into the system of disability benefits and speculative imagining of how a near-future, seemingly well-intentioned government might nevertheless incorporate AI decision making, and how this might conflict with goals that centre the needs of the most vulnerable.
This interactive installation uses gameplay to turn visitors into civil servants of the future, working with and against the smart computer to help distribute resources and support for disabled individuals and communities.
Free, sign up essential Monday 23 November 2026, 6–8 pm UK time Hybrid in London and online
I’m running a workshop with Studio Voltaire for trans folks on hand-making personal online archives of our activism, advocacy, and resilience. I’ll be joining remotely, and Studio Voltaire will provide support to folks in person.
I’m very passionate about hand-coded websites, I think it’s intrinsically a beautiful thing to just edit HTML and CSS and make things happen on a web page.
I had the pleasure of being interviewed by Marti Abernathey last week for her rebooted T-Party Podcast. Marti has been involved in trans activism for a long time, and is even mentioned in Susan Stryker’s Transgender History (I was listening to the audiobook while playing Minecraft, and had to stop digging to celebrate. That’s my Tiktok friend!) Marti is also the only other person I know who actually uses Peertube’s synchronisation feature to mirror and archive their Tiktok posts - something that I think is really important for us all to be doing in order to reduce our dependence on social media corporations, but that is hard to persuade people to do this when running a Peertube costs money.
I’m preparing a zine for Fedizinefest 2026-2027! I’ll be making a collage photocopy zine for the digital and physical packs.
Fedizinefest is an art sharing project for people who use the Fediverse, an interconnected network of social media sites, many of which are independent projects run by and for communities on a non-profit basis. I have a bunch of Fediverse accounts, including the blog you’re reading right now! More details are on my /follow page.
We’ve just completed a beautiful project at Desperate Livin. Raju Rage brought together a large group of contributors to create an audiobook edition of Stone Butch Blues, which is available for free as a non-profit non-commercial work. I added them to our Desperate Livin archive, and along the way made some modifications to improve the experience for screen reader users.
Check it out at https://desperatelivin.com/nav/sbb
Leslie Feinberg’s novel Stone Butch Blues has been uploaded to the Desperate Livin’ website as a free, open-source audiobook.
Last year I had the pleasure of contributing writing, research, and narrative design for Caroline Sinders and Romayne GadelRab’s new interactive installation that explores AI and decision making through the lens of disability benefits.
We drew inspiration from bureaucracy simulators such as “Papers, Please”, which have the player make decisions on other people’s lives. Instead of an allegorical dystopia, we decided to portray a near-future society beginning to attempt to reform the system to be more humane to disabled people.
After more than a decade, I’ve decided to step away from the board of Critical Distance. I love this organisation so much, and I’m proud of what we do to contribute to a culture of online writing about games. I haven’t been able to play an active role in this since my MS diagnosis, and it’s time for me to move on and make room for someone else who can put new energy into it.
Next week I’m headed to London again, this time to give a workshop at Studio Voltaire sharing skills and inviting people to contribute to the Desperate Livin trans health archive. We’re going to explore some DIY digital archives, and I’m going to try to share some of the joy I feel about the handmade independent web.
To me, making a webpage yourself using simple html is intrinsically a beautiful thing to do, because it gets you closer to the materiality of the thing you’re working with.
Is ‘Society’ In The Room With Us Now? 21st November 7pm UK time Hedi (Fadumo Hassan) is a rising star of the tech world, and nobody knows they are secretly an alien anthropologist. Hedi is optimistic about the future - we’re going to solve all our problems with increasingly powerful technology, just like Star Trek. But when the tech world lets them down, it’s up to the audience to decide how they will respond.
An edited recording of the September performance of "Assigned Earth at Birth" is screening this Wednesday, at an event on the topic of genre in media made by and for trans people. The video will drop on theIntrapology Patreon on Thursday. It will be a public post, and if you sign up as a Patreon supporter you'll be notified automatically.
Also, next week we're performing the next episode, "Is 'Society' in the Room with us Now?
Tickets are now available for Assigned Earth at Birth, via our audience partner Now Play This. It would mean the world to me if you shared the link with someone who would love the show.
Tickets page: https://www.eventbrite.co.uk/e/intrapology-assigned-earth-at-birth-tickets-1016657880087
Photo by Holly Revell Assigned Earth at Birth 26th September 2024, 7pm UK time
Tea (Xander Graves) has discovered that they are not an ordinary human - they are a transdimensional being, assigned to earth to study humans.
I have so much exciting news to share about Intrapology in the coming weeks. For now, the important thing is this: we have three performances scheduled before the end of the year, and I want you at all three of them. Here are some handy Google calendar links so that you can save the dates!
Episode 1: Assigned Earth at Birth
with Now Play This Festival
26th September, 7pm UK time
The Photographer's Gallery have very kindly posted the full video of a panel discussion between myself and other artists who contributed to INCITE: Digital Arts and Activism. There's some great stuff here, including Joseph DeLappe's critical encounters with memorials, Martin Zeilinger's wry "proof of cake" system, and Maja Zeco's reflections on islamophobia and European identity.
I stop faffing with technology and start actually talking at 43:10
[youtu.be/sIDvq3W5z...](https://youtu.be/sIDvq3W5zHw?t=2586)
In absolutely amazing news, Intrapology has managed to get a £60,400 grant from Arts Council England. It will allow us to create and perform a five-episode first season, as well as share the process and our software!
This has been several months in the making, after a lot of work, care, and kindness from many different people and organisations. We've really had to fight for this grant and use every resource available to keep things together - everyone who backs the project on Patreon contributed to this, by showing that we have support in addition to their funding.
I had the honour of being invited to write about my research and art practice, including Intrapology, for Henry Jenkins's PopMatters blog. In particular, I consider how multiverse stories can play a role in making life more bearable for one another, and how we practice shared worlding when modernist grand narratives can no longer be relied upon to shape social consensus.
I came to understand what it means to be a genderqueer person and a transgender man because I encountered the stories of other transgender people, through meeting people in LGBTQ+ community spaces, watching documentaries made by other trans people such as Fox Fisher’s My Genderation project, exploring trans people’s blogs and video-blogs, and playing indie games in the early years of the queer games movement.
This evening I'm doing a remote event with Max*ine Vajt of No Fun Collective, connected with an exhibition programme at Trafo Gallery in Budapest. The exhibition is on until 7th April, and includes work by Bassam Al-Sabah, Hollow (Gyula Muskovics, Tamás Páll, Viktor Szeri), Denis Kozerawski, Lawrence Lek, Paula Malinowska, Tabitha Nikolai, and Sin Wai Kin.
19:30 - 21:00 Lecture performance with Zoyander Street
Moderated by Maxine Vajt
Venue: Trafoclub
Date: 21 March, 7pm
Running Time: 120 min
Location: Studio 2, Lincoln Arts Centre
We're performing the first 20 minutes of Assigned Earth at Birth at this night of test performances in Lincoln. I'm particularly chuffed that we're performing alongside the wonderful Ashley Gregory, an extraordinarily talented person I met when working on an interactive play with Sheffield Theatres Young Company. Ashley Gregory – Adam & Eve (& Steve) A divorced loser unwittingly encounters the original couple, jaded by their mortal marriage, and must learn what it means to be a mortal.
Cis Penance is going to be displayed at Now Play This, definitely one of my favourite festivals! Details below.
6 April - 14 April 2024 (excluding Monday 8 April) Somerset House New Wing and River Terrace
General Admission: £9 / Concessions: £6.50 / Family Ticket: £26 (Two adults and up to three children) Events: daytime events free as part of general admission, ticketed evening events £6 each
Festival Pass: £30
I'm developing a new episode of Intrapology, with the support of a couple of fantastic scratch performance nights. It's a karaoke jukebox musical with parody lyrics chosen by the audience! You know, because making a live, interactive, online/hybrid show wasn't technically challenging enough already 🫠
One of the scratch performances is part of ASSEMBLE festival at Streatham Space Project (LONDON!) on 4th May, alongside other short test performances about migration, heritage, and home.
Date: 06:30pm - 08:00pm, Thu 07 Mar 2024
Price: £8, £5 concessions
Location: The Photographers' Gallery
Join us for a book launch and panel discussion to celebrate the publication of INCITE: Digital Art & Activism.
Join us for a book launch and panel discussion to celebrate the publication of INCITE: Digital Art & Activism. This collaborative artist book features creative responses from artists, scholars, and activists connected through the Digital Art and Activism Network.
I've launched a small Patreon for my big dream project! It would mean a lot to have just a few people put their support behind the Intrapology Patreon at this early stage. The Patreon will have regular updates on the development of this project, reflections on the performances that we've done so far, as well as notes on the theory, historical context, and cultural influences that I'm researching for the show.
I've been so excited for this book to come out, and it's finally ready! It's a gorgeous risograph-printed collection of contributions by a number of artists. Mine focuses on the wonderful character designs that June Hornby made for Cis Penance, and highlights three key moments from the interactive conversations with trans people. Details below...
Buy from Peacock & Worm INCITE: Digital Art & Activism is a collaborative artist book featuring creative responses from artists, scholars and activists connected through the Digital Art and Activism Network, Edited by Joseph DeLappe (Abertay University) and Laura Leuzzi (Robert Gordon University).
I'm excited to be taking Intrapology to the Worlds in Play conference at Arizona State University this January, presenting a performance of Assigned Earth at Birth - I'll be there in person, both actors will join by video call, and the audience will shape the performance live through the app that Squinky and I made. I'm really looking forward to showing and discussing this project with an audience specialising in the meeting point between theatre and games, and learning from what other people are doing in this space.
Tickets for the Social Model & More Festival are now available! You can book a place at the performance of Assigned Earth at Birth on the Theatre Deli website - buying a ticket will get you access to the whole festival, though you might still need to book a place on other workshops and performances.
Social Model & More page for Assigned Earth at Birth
And don't forget that I'm taking orders of some really cool shirts that say Assigned Earth at Birth on them!
Next week I'll be on a couple of panels for Sightlines Festival, an online week-long festival exploring more topics around performance and wellbeing, with a specific emphasis on Bradford and the North of England. Image of schedule for Sightlines Festival - screen reader friendly details are available on sightlinesfestival.co.uk I'm on the Friday 13th October 5pm panel on Neuroqueerness and Performance, and the Saturday 14th October 1pm Chronic Illness and Theatre panel.
https://shop.typeset.space/products/aeab-shirt
I'm making a limited run of shirts with local social enterprise Printed By Us, selling through Typeset. It's a kind of crowdfunding campaign, in that we'll be able to make the shirts when we hit 30 orders.
Order now from shop.typeset.space!
I'm putting together some merch for the first episode of Intrapology, to sell via my community bookshop, made by local social enterprise Printed By Us.
I've very kindly been offered one of five spaces to pitch a project at Interactive Soup this September, at Theatre Deli Leadenhall. I'm going to pitch Intrapology, in the hope of winning some funding for the November performance of the pilot episode, 'Assigned Earth at Birth'. Intrapology is a weird project that I care a great deal about, and I'm grateful for these rare opportunities to perhaps reach the incredibly specific kind of person who would love neuroqueer interactive social constructivist sci-fi online theatre.
I'm thrilled to be working on an interactive play for the Social Model & More Festival at Theatre Delicatessen this November.
'Assigned Earth at Birth' is a live-digital hybrid, interactive sci-fi comedy about doomerism, neurodiversity / neuroqueerness, and the pain of living in a world that works against your survival.
Building on the test performance at Barnsley Live in March this year, 'Assigned Earth at Birth' will be the first episode of Intrapology, a new interactive speculative fiction series that I really, really want to make.
Date: 13.05.2023
Beginning: 18:00
FREE ENTRY / IN ENGLISH
etc. galerie z.s.
Sarajevská 68/16
Praha 2 120 00
Czech Republic
IČ: 22738924
The project was financially supported by the City of Prague, the State Cultural Fund, and the Ministry of Culture of the Czech Republic.
Cis Penance is currently included in a fantastic exhibition of queer games at Etc Galerie in Prague, created by No Fun Collective. They're organising an event this Saturday, which I'll be joining remotely.
Amazingly, somehow I've gotten one of the coveted DYCP grants from Arts Council England! I'm really pleased as this almost sorts out the rest of my year, and takes away a lot of question marks about what I will be doing next.
The grant is going to allow me to spend a few months developing my skills and knowledge on accessible design for web and games, as well as adapting my practice to Multiple Sclerosis.
Last year I worked with Joey Eschrich on a collaborate writing event with Critical Distance, and we recently wrote an article about it that has just been published. Here we consider how the essay jam, and Critical Distance’s larger editorial structure, capture productive tensions in community-led, community-responsive publishing. We also suggest future directions for structuring collaborative writing activities, from figuring out incentives for participating authors to creating a culture of dialogue around drafts and ideas in progress.
I wrote a short essay in the "Science Fiction Frames" format for Arizona State University Centre for Science and the Imagination's newsletter Imaginary Papers. Building on a presentation I gave a few years ago, it's a discussion of how speculative wearable devices support the narrative of Simon Amstell's 2017 mockumentary Carnage, including a quick comparison with Donna Haraway's Camille Stories.
Check it out here:
https://mailchi.mp/asu.edu/imaginary-papers-issue-12-nov-2022
Fun side-note: until I rewatched Carnage, I have completely forgotten that Amstell had actually anticipated a global pandemic and written it into the timeline that leads up to a utopian future society where animal exploitation has ended.
An installation of Interactive Portraits: Trans People in Japan will be hosted at BitBash Chicago's event on 12th November as part of the Chicao Humanities Festival. This is the afterparty for The Social Mind, an afternoon of talks and discussion on big tech, algorithms, and mental health, created in partnership with The Verge. Find out more and get tickets from the Chicago Humanities Festival website.
This year I've had the pleasure of doing a little project with Raju Rage and Studio Voltaire, creating a web experience for their online archive of transgender health resources. They launched it this week, and you can check it out at desperatelivin.com.
[www.instagram.com/p/CkJEzZp...](https://www.instagram.com/p/CkJEzZpMZG2/) They reached out to commission this after they had included Cis Penance in an online exhibition. Since their archive includes a lot of zines and artist-made publications, the rough DIY aesthetic of Cis Penance felt like a good fit.
A quick note that my book Delay: Paying Attention to Energy Mechanics is in the itch.io Bundle for Ukraine, which has already raised $5.5 million for the charities International Medical Corps and Voices of Children. The bundle includes content from 736 creators, making it an incredible way to get hold of a huge collection of indie games and other material hosted on itch.io, while supporting charities responding under the horrifying conditions of Russia's senseless war.
I'm delighted to share that I'm one of a number of artists receiving support from Sheffield Theatres for the next year as part of the Bank Cohort! I'll be building on some of the work I did last year, and trying out some new ideas, as well as finding new ways to do fun things with theatre and games. I'm incredibly pleased, and very uplifted by the warmth and openness of the folks at Sheffield Theatres.
I'm excited to be in conversation with Caroline Sinders this Saturday at Site Gallery, in the final event of their Digital Residency. Caroline's art research practice addresses the potentials and injustices of tech, with a focus on exploring liberatory alternatives to the extractive big data industry. Sign up here. Also, earlier that day, I'll be hosting another in-conversation event at Typeset, between author Tair Rafiq and Dr. David Hartley, co-founder of the Narratives of Neurodiversity Network.
The interactive live performance of my collab project with Squinky is next week, and tickets are still available! Details below.
About this event Video Call Calamity is an online interactive play about the awkwardness of video calls, and the scripts and protocols that we use to try to pass as ‘normal’.
Audience members are invited (but not forced!) to take on the roles of two of the main characters, while the rest of the audience creates the script live, through voting and text chat.
On 27th July, as part of a series of online events run by Arizona State University’s Centre for Science and the Imagination, I will be talking about Kentucky Route Zero with Rachel Carr, a scholar of Southern U.S. and Modernist literature, as well as Women’s and Gender Studies, at Lindsey Wilson College in Kentucky. We’ll be talking about gothic motifs of places that carry trauma, figurations of rural and post-industrial landscapes, and the role of play and art in how the game imagines post-capitalist ways of living.
I am one of three judges on Andro & Eve's Reclaiming the Rainbow Photo Challenge - details below. Please send in your weirdest visual experiments with rainbows!
Reclaiming the Rainbow Photo Challenge is a way to raise awareness of the Pride flag as a symbol of safety, build connections, and celebrate the strength of the South Yorkshire LGBTQ+ community through this difficult time.
Are you LGBTQ+ and living in South Yorkshire?
I recently had the joy of becoming one of 8 new trustees of digital arts festival North East of North (NEoN). At a time when arts and culture organisations are under extraordinary pressure, I'm excited to play even a small role in this fantastic organisation's work supporting and showcasing digital art, elevating marginalised voices, and exploring new ways to serve audiences that are often excluded from art spaces. Learn more about NEoN and the other trustees at the link below!
Cis Penance is currently on display online at Studio Voltaire, as part of artist Raju Rage's research project with trans writing project The Right Lube. They are doing work around trans self-medding and bodily autonomy, under the following statement:
“We stand for self-agency in determining our own heath requirements and gender definitions and not having to rely on a medical system that is often a barrier for trans people for multiple reasons, such as not meeting requirements and fitting definitions that are cis gender determined, not having access to services, gatekeeping and waiting on a national health service that has been cut, wanting autonomy from medical recognition, plus more.