{
"version": "https://jsonfeed.org/version/1",
"title": "announcements on Zoyander Street",
"icon": "https://avatars.micro.blog/avatars/2024/48/1690272.jpg",
"home_page_url": "https://blog.zoyander.cc/",
"feed_url": "https://blog.zoyander.cc/feed.json",
"items": [
{
"id": "http://zoyander.micro.blog/2026/10/15/strap-up-trans-masc-erotic.html",
"title": "STRAP UP Trans Masc Erotic Art Exhibition \u0026 Performance Night",
"content_html": "
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!
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SEESAW \n86 Princess Street, Manchester, M1 6NG (view map) \nFriday 23rd October 2026 at 6:00 PM \nAccessibility - Accessible Toilets, Complimentary Ticket for Assistant, Quiet Space, Step Free Access, Wheelchair Accessible \n£15 to £16
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.
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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. Workplace technologies are often designed to individuate and piecemeal work – programming us into worker-bots to run their systems – but can humans work together to overturn the decisions made by the machine?
Free, sign up essential\nMonday 23 November 2026, 6–8 pm UK time\nHybrid in London and online
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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.
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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 also believe it’s vital that we adopt indie web principles in marginalised online communities, because the big tech platforms are not our friends! So this is about doing something joyful and vital, rather than about being a particularly proficient programmer (which I am not). Please join, and share this with folks who might be interested.
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Zoyander Street hosts a hybrid online-and-in-person workshop on coding and content. This hands-on session focuses on practical digital skills for community use, including adding, updating and amending website materials, as well as incorporating accessible formats.\nIn this workshop, participants will learn how to share and build digital skills; centre Trans health, autonomy and community-led knowledge; increase the accessibility of handmade personal websites; and keep archives socially active and sustainable.\nDesperate Livin’ is an interactive digital archive of materials created by and for members of the Trans community, supporting autonomy, health and resilience. The open-source website was compiled by Raju Rage and designed by Zoyander Street in 2022.
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"date_published": "2026-10-08T14:10:00+00:00",
"url": "https://blog.zoyander.cc/2026/10/08/desperate-livin-coding-and-content.html",
"tags": ["events","internet","announcements"]
},
{
"id": "http://zoyander.micro.blog/2026/10/01/interview-for-marti-abernatheys-the.html",
"title": "Interview for Marti Abernathey's The T Party podcast reboot",
"content_html": "
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.
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What has algorithmic social media taken from marginalised communities, and what can we build instead? Artist-researcher Dr Zoyander Street joins Marti for a wide-ranging conversation about owning your content, the myth of the algorithm, AI, and why trans people need to archive our own history.
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We talk about why content recommendation algorithms are really built to suppress your posts, why Mastodon works like a school cafeteria, whether there’s a real middle ground on AI, and Desperate Living, Zoyander’s hand-built archive of trans health resources with Studio Voltaire. Marti also looks back on 26 years of trans media, from GayBC and Transsister Radio to The Radical Trannies, and the history that’s quietly disappearing.
I’m preparing a zine for Fedizinefest 2026-2027! I’ll be making a collage photocopy zine for the digital and physical packs.
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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.
Leslie Feinberg’s novel Stone Butch Blues has been uploaded to the Desperate Livin’ website as a free, open-source audiobook. The project was narrated by a collective of transgender, queer and ally volunteers and hosted on Desperate Livin’, an interactive digital archive of trans community resources created by artists Raju Rage and Zoyander Street and supported by Studio Voltaire.
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Stone Butch Blues (1993) is a novel written by organiser, trans activist and butch Lesbian, Leslie Feinberg (1949–2014), and is considered a foundational work of trans fiction.
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"date_published": "2026-09-07T16:32:45+00:00",
"url": "https://blog.zoyander.cc/2026/09/07/stone-butch-blues-free-audiobook.html",
"tags": ["announcements"]
},
{
"id": "http://zoyander.micro.blog/2026/04/17/ai-and-the-paradox-of.html",
"title": "AI and the Paradox of Agency exhibition",
"content_html": "
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.
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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. This attempt is furtive and incomplete, not least because its institutions still reduce people to numbers and datapoints.
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The piece is now on display at Umea University’s Bildmuseet as part of the exhibition “AI and the Paradox of Agency”, which runs from 2026-03-13 to 2027-01-17.
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.
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Critical Distance’s work becomes more important with each passing year, as threats to online writing intensify. The issue forefront of mind of late is AI, but this is just an extension of the patterns of enshittification that have been hostile to grassroots online culture for a long time. Writing became content, content became data, and with each step writers were ever more devalued. We need online spaces that intentionally cultivate an interest in each other’s contributions, provide support and encouragement to creative people who have something to say, and archive it for longevity and searchability.
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There’s a lot of room here for volunteer work to strengthen the project. I’ve been particularly interested in finding help with our archiving tools, which would be a great project for a student or someone building their open-source web development skills. Expanding Critical Distance’s reach across platforms and formats could also be valuable work, perhaps by creating a new podcast series or reviewing the weekly roundups in a Twitch stream.
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Our community recently rallied to boost support for our Patreon, meeting our new funding target within a day. With more funding, Critical Distance could expand its archiving efforts and carry out upgrades to the website, including overcoming bot traffic issues that have rendered our RSS feeds unusable. Please consider becoming a Critical Distance supporter on Patreon, so that they can get bigger and stronger while I get some rest.
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"date_published": "2026-04-13T08:03:38+00:00",
"url": "https://blog.zoyander.cc/2026/04/13/leaving-critical-distance.html",
"tags": ["announcements"]
},
{
"id": "http://zoyander.micro.blog/2026/01/16/website-making-for-trans-health.html",
"title": "Website making for trans health",
"content_html": "
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.
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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. This is all the more important during the AI bubble, as so many drag-and-drop tools have now incorporated generative AI (as Chris Lawrence pointed out in the announcement of the Critical Distance Fansite Jam).
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There are still a couple of places left, so if you’re a trans person in reach of London who wants to contribute to digital resilience for the community, please register.
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“Zoyander Street hosts a workshop on coding and content, with support from artist Jennifer Booth. This hands-on session focuses on practical digital skills for community use, including adding, updating and amending website materials, as well as incorporating accessible formats.
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“In this workshop, participants will learn how to share and build digital skills; centre Trans health, autonomy and community-led knowledge; increase accessibility of the Desperate Livin’ website; and keep the archive socially active and sustainable.
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“Desperate Livin’ is an interactive digital archive of materials created by and for members of the Trans community, supporting autonomy, health and resilience. The site is open-source and was compiled by Raju Rage and designed by Zoyander Street in 2022.
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“Please note that this workshop is specifically designed for and by Trans people. Please complete the expression of interest form below. Your attendance will be confirmed on Friday 16 January 2026.
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“A laptop is needed to participate in this workshop. If you don’t have one, please let us know and we can provide one.
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“This workshop forms part of Tender Living, supported by Arts Council England and Paul Hamlyn Foundation.”
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"date_published": "2026-01-16T15:07:00+00:00",
"url": "https://blog.zoyander.cc/2026/01/16/website-making-for-trans-health.html",
"tags": ["announcements"]
},
{
"id": "http://zoyander.micro.blog/2024/11/18/is-society-in-the-room.html",
"title": "Is 'Society' in the Room with us Now? | Intrapology S01E02",
"content_html": "\n
\nIs ‘Society’ In The Room With Us Now? 21st November 7pm UK time\n
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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.
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This is the second episode of Intrapology, but you do not need to have seen the first episode to follow the story.
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Presented in partnership with Queerness and Games Conference
Unwaged: email contact@intrapology.com for free registration link
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Note: In place of a ticketing service, I'm using a Patreon post that links out to the registration page. To register for the performance, click through to the registration page and fill out the short form.
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About Intrapology
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Intrapology is all about how people make worlds together, and the cataclysmic social fragmentation that threatens to unmake them. It focuses on the perspectives of neurodivergent queer folk, as alien anthropologists doing fieldwork on earth. They interact via video call with their supervisors at the fictional Transdimensional Research Institute, an alien university that has been decimated by cuts to the fabric of reality. Together they expose the comedy and terror of living in a world that was not built with people like you in mind.
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The audience collectively shapes the story, experiencing the show on a web page that looks like the protagonist’s computer desktop. Through this online format, Intrapology aims to reach disabled, chronically ill, and neurodivergent audiences that have been left behind by the return to in-person events. It aims to move beyond the limitations of online theatre as we know it, with an approach to design that draws on alternative indie games culture.
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"date_published": "2024-11-18T19:15:00+00:00",
"url": "https://blog.zoyander.cc/2024/11/18/is-society-in-the-room.html",
"tags": ["announcements"]
},
{
"id": "http://zoyander.micro.blog/2024/11/11/screening-at-edge-hill-university.html",
"title": "Screening at Edge Hill University",
"content_html": "\n
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 the Intrapology Patreon on Thursday. It will be a public post, and if you sign up as a Patreon supporter you'll be notified automatically.
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Also, next week we're performing the next episode, \"Is 'Society' in the Room with us Now?\" - sign up for that performance here. It's free for paying Patreon supporters, or you can make a one-off payment of $10.
TheTrans Genre, Trans Formsymposium and film festival explores genre in films by trans and non-binary filmmakers in the 2020s.
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While trans representations in the 2010s required trans people to be hyper visible and legible, educating others on trans experience, the effect of these prior representations has allowed trans filmmakers in the 2020s to explore other factors.
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Genre and film form are used by trans filmmakers in the 2020s to approach trans existence complexly and with a deeper and more elaborate, lived understanding at the base level. Exploring genre and form then allows for trans people to critique and create new forms of representation.
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The festival includes films by international filmmakers and explores all genres, including films where genre is deconstructed and used playfully.
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Horror, comedy, video essays, documentaries, drama and fantasy are all available in individually programmed sessions throughout the day.
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Films will be supported with discussion on genre from the filmmakers.
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There will also be a Q&A with symposium organiser, postgraduate researcher and filmmaker Sammy Holden.
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To find out more about the individual films as well as content warnings click here.
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"date_published": "2024-11-11T19:58:00+00:00",
"url": "https://blog.zoyander.cc/2024/11/11/screening-at-edge-hill-university.html",
"tags": ["announcements"]
},
{
"id": "http://zoyander.micro.blog/2024/09/13/intrapology-assigned-earth.html",
"title": "Intrapology: Assigned Earth at Birth tickets link now live!",
"content_html": "\n
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.
Tea (Xander Graves) has discovered that they are not an ordinary human - they are a transdimensional being, assigned to earth to study humans. We influence their behaviour in their first meetings via video call with their otherworldly drag king supervisor, Iris (Caitlin Magnall-Kearns). Understandably, Tea is furious about being assigned to such a horrible project, and demands to be reassigned; but relocation has unanticipated consequences for both characters.
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\n\n\nPhoto by Holly Revell\n\n\n
Now Play This Presents
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Now Play This Presents is \"a dynamic, evolving space designed to support projects and ideas in development beyond the annual [Now Play This] festival.\"
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The inaugural Presents games span the breadth of playful media, expertly showing how games can be used to tackle complex topics. The Strand Avian Society invites players into a secret world of birds through a site-specific street game, and Intrapology blends game and theatre to create an innovative interactive performance.
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!
I'm sharing Intrapology updates on the Patreon, and you should be able to access them if you're on the free tier: http://patreon.com/intrapology
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"date_published": "2024-08-16T16:20:25+00:00",
"url": "https://blog.zoyander.cc/2024/08/16/intrapology-autumn-dates.html",
"tags": ["announcements"]
},
{
"id": "http://zoyander.micro.blog/2024/07/22/video-panel-discussion.html",
"title": "VIDEO panel discussion at book launch for INCITE: Digital Arts and Activism",
"content_html": "\n
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.
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I stop faffing with technology and start actually talking at 43:10
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"date_published": "2024-07-22T17:55:53+00:00",
"url": "https://blog.zoyander.cc/2024/07/22/video-panel-discussion.html",
"tags": ["events","announcements"]
},
{
"id": "http://zoyander.micro.blog/2024/07/02/arts-council-project.html",
"title": "Arts Council Project Grant for Intrapology",
"content_html": "\n\n\n\n
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.
This really is a very challenging time for arts funding, and it feels like a small miracle that we actually get to make something strange and beautiful.
For me this is a great relief and a terrifying new challenge. The version of me who writes grants sees only potential, while the version of me who manages projects only sees problems to solve. But alongside the fear there's a new sense of freedom and hope. For seven months, all I've done is write applications for grants, commissions, residencies, etc. Now I finally have a little space to create things!
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"date_published": "2024-07-02T15:16:22+00:00",
"url": "https://blog.zoyander.cc/2024/07/02/arts-council-project.html",
"tags": ["announcements"]
},
{
"id": "http://zoyander.micro.blog/2024/04/25/moving-between-worldviews.html",
"title": "Moving Between World(views) with Database Narratives",
"content_html": "\n
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.
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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. Each individual story contributes to a larger reality—a world in which gender identity exists independently of sex assigned at birth, gender dysphoria causes significant distress that one might only recognise after unlearning lifelong dissociative habits, and gender euphoria can be experienced by trans and cis people alike. Each testimony adds to my own internal database of things it is possible to feel, be, see and do.
This is part of a series written by contributors to Imagining Transmedia, a new book of essays published by the MIT Press. The book explores how transmedia techniques are being used in a wide range of settings, from entertainment and education to health care, journalism, politics, urban planning, and more. I have a chapter in that book about Cis Penance, as well as a discussion with Kristen Ostherr about the use of transmedia methods in medical practice. It's the biggest book I've contributed to, and it came out of a fascinating workshopping process that had a big impact on how I think about creative collaborations.
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.
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19:30 - 21:00 Lecture performance with Zoyander Street
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Moderated by Maxine Vajt
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Venue: Trafoclub
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Waiting is generally quite annoying. Sometimes it feels one would rather clean the windows, than wait at the post office. But what if there is no end in sight? When suffering from long covid, and no doctor really seems to care? When neurodivergency is systematically misdiagnosed? When accessing gender affirming therapy is impossible, or so far in the future that it is nearly impossible to imagine? For the interviewees of Zoyander Street´s game Cis Penance, waiting for one or more of these is, or at least was, a significant part of their life. Surely not a foreign feeling to Hungarian trans people, whose waiting time has been since 2020 prolonged indefinitely. The performative lecture will take us on a trip through the intersections of neurodiversity and gender diversity, of sickness, body normativity, generative forms of rage, accessibility, and how we can protect ourselves, in waiting from the powers at be.
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"date_published": "2024-03-23T17:17:00+00:00",
"url": "https://blog.zoyander.cc/2024/03/23/cis-penance-at-trafo-gallery.html",
"tags": ["announcements"]
},
{
"id": "http://zoyander.micro.blog/2024/03/15/intrapology-at-lincoln-arts-centre.html",
"title": "Intrapology at Lincoln Arts Centre Demo Night",
"content_html": "\n
Date: 21 March, 7pm
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Running Time: 120 min
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Location: Studio 2, Lincoln Arts Centre
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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.
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Ashley Gregory – Adam & Eve (& Steve)
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A divorced loser unwittingly encounters the original couple, jaded by their mortal marriage, and must learn what it means to be a mortal.
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Mouth House – The Museum of Curios
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Mouth house tonight asks you how you feel in a world blocked out by sound? How do we feel when stories are played back to us in darkness, leaving only our imagination to bring these stories to life?
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Zoyander Street – Assigned Earth at Birth
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Cass has discovered that they are not an ordinary human – they are a transdimensional being, assigned to earth to carry out anthropological fieldwork. In this play, they have their first meetings via video call with their otherworldly drag king supervisor, Iris. ‘Assigned Earth at Birth’ is a live-digital hybrid, interactive sci-fi comedy about doomerism, neurodiversity / neuroqueerness, and living in a world that works against your survival. Interacting with live actors using a web app, the audience shapes the protagonist’s narrative about society, reflecting how the anthropologist has been shaped by their host society, and giving the audience an opportunity to vent their feelings about our fucked-up world.
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"date_published": "2024-03-15T15:45:00+00:00",
"url": "https://blog.zoyander.cc/2024/03/15/intrapology-at-lincoln-arts-centre.html",
"tags": ["announcements"]
},
{
"id": "http://zoyander.micro.blog/2024/03/01/cis-penance-at-now-play.html",
"title": "Cis Penance at Now Play This 2024",
"content_html": "\n
Cis Penance is going to be displayed at Now Play This, definitely one of my favourite festivals! Details below.
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6 April - 14 April 2024 (excluding Monday 8 April) Somerset House New Wingand 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
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London’s leading festival of innovative and experimental games, Now Play This, returns to Somerset House to celebrate its tenth anniversary as part of the city-wide London Games Festival. Featuring hit games from indie and big-name studios from across the globe, Now Play This explores how play can bridge the gap between generations, geographies and languages under a new theme, Liminal: Playing Between Worlds. Alongside a packed programme of daily events, the eight-day festival includes live play activities, screenings and a variety of family sessions over the Easter holidays, sparking playful encounters and deep conversations.
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"date_published": "2024-03-01T18:26:00+00:00",
"url": "https://blog.zoyander.cc/2024/03/01/cis-penance-at-now-play.html",
"tags": ["events","announcements"]
},
{
"id": "http://zoyander.micro.blog/2024/02/28/intrapology-at-assemble-festival-scratch.html",
"title": "Intrapology at ASSEMBLE Festival Scratch Night #2",
"content_html": "\n
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 🫠
Join us for ASSEMBLE Festival, our 2-week theatre and performance festival exploring the innate need for humans to gather, in rage and optimism, when facing the complexities and uncertainties of our world. Our programme of work includes both full-length shows as well as short, work-in-progress performances that explore migration, neurodiversity, taboo love stories, climate change, the cost-of-living crisis, decolonisation, grief and so much more. Assemble in anger, assemble in hope. Assemble because you know that, ultimately, our collective capacity for change is all we have.
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"date_published": "2024-02-28T16:06:00+00:00",
"url": "https://blog.zoyander.cc/2024/02/28/intrapology-at-assemble-festival-scratch.html",
"tags": ["events","announcements"]
},
{
"id": "http://zoyander.micro.blog/2024/02/20/book-launch-for-incite-digital.html",
"title": "Book launch for INCITE: Digital Arts and Activism",
"content_html": "\n
Date: 06:30pm - 08:00pm, Thu 07 Mar 2024
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Price: £8, £5 concessions
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Location: The Photographers' Gallery
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Join us for a book launch and panel discussion to celebrate the publication of INCITE: Digital Art & Activism.
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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.
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Hear from editors Joseph DeLappe and Laura Leuzzi, as well as Emile Shemilt, Zoyander Street, Maja Zećo & Martin Zeilinger who each contributed to the publication. It is moderated by Dr. Alessandro Ludovico. The panel discussion will be followed by a book signing.
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.
Intrapology is a neuroqueering sci-fi multiverse, explored by alien anthropologists and their supervisors at the Transdimensional Research Institute. It's all about about how people make worlds together, and the cataclysmic social fragmentation that threatens to unmake them.
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This is feminist technoscience worldbuilding that takes social constructivism literally, to the point of absurdism - each world is literally enacted by the society that inhabits it. The question is, why are we socially constructing such a shithole?
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Interacting with live actors using a web app, the audience shapes the protagonist’s narrative about society, reflecting how the anthropologist has been shaped by their host society, and giving the audience an opportunity to vent their feelings about our fucked-up world.
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Aims
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\nStay with the trouble in an entangled mess of a world Engage with the failures of our crumbling infrastructure and institutions, explore how to live well in broken systems, and use humour for catharsis while resisting doomerism.
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\nExplore agency as a spectrum Critically explore individual and collective agency, different flavours of agency, and free will in a disabling world. Interaction goes beyond choose-your-own-adventure mechanics: audiences influence tone, contribute thoughts to live stream-of-consciousness rants, and vote on significant choices that affect the plot.
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\nEnact solidarity across borders and barriers Combine universal design with the broke-ass queer aesthetics of glitching recycled computers. Reach towards permacomputing, with low-impact technologies. Adopt an intersectional understanding of mobility, grounding fictional transdimensional travel in the lived experiences of migrants and refugees as well as disabled and chronically ill people.
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Form
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Intrapology is inspired by:
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narrative-led, magical-realist, anti-capitalist indie games, such as Disco Elysium and Kentucky Route Zero;
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cosmic comedy drama such as The Good Place and Good Omens;
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and internet cult hit storyworlds such as Welcome to Night Vale and The Magnus Archives.
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It is designed primarily for audiences who face barriers to real-life art spaces to enjoy live from home, with online-only or hybrid performances, and edited videos of each episode.
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Creative risks
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On a personal note, Intrapology is a really big step forward compared to where my practice was a couple of years ago. MS has introduced uncertainty about my future, as well as constraints to my day to day life. This pushes me to take creative risks, explore ideas that I’ve previously considered too weird, and take larger steps toward my longer-term goals. This is, I hope, going to be a big project, because it ties together a very large web of ideas and issues that I want to explore and share while I still can.
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Adapting also includes unmasking, as a late-discovered neurodivergent person. To avoid being “too much” for audiences and funders, I used to break my dreams down into digestible, iterative steps; nowadays, to realise my dreams in “crip time”, I have to go fully weird. This may be contributing to Intrapology being unusually difficult to get funded, though it's hard to say to what extent it's the project itself and to what extent things are just incredibly challenging right now for all artists.
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I've had many emotionally intense over the past year, because I've suddenly lost a kind of protective barrier that I used to put up around my practice. Although there's still a significant research process behind this project, it's not like I'm making non-fiction anymore, where I sort of stand alongside the viewer and guide them to look at the world around us in a new way. I'm saying something about how things look from my own standpoint, which feels like giving away my home address to a group of strangers.
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In a lot of ways, Intrapology is my inner world. It's the stories I think about when I'm going to sleep. There is dialogue drawn directly from my personal experience - for example, Iris saying \"it seems you expect something from me\" is taken verbatim from some of the medical gaslighting I experienced in 2022. It's an attempt to express overwhelming emotions that are rooted in a fundamental need to live in the same world as other people.
\n\n",
"date_published": "2024-01-15T20:12:00+00:00",
"url": "https://blog.zoyander.cc/2024/01/15/patreon-launch-for-intrapology-assigned.html",
"tags": ["announcements"]
},
{
"id": "http://zoyander.micro.blog/2023/12/09/incite-digital-arts-and-activism.html",
"title": "INCITE: Digital Arts and Activism",
"content_html": "\n
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...
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).
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Each contributor was asked to create a three-page chapter, in an effort to gather the disparate yet connected activism, practices and scholarship as represented by those involved in the network. Peacock & the worm Risograph Technician Neil Corall interpreted their individual submissions for the Risograph and designed the book’s overall layout, bringing together the diverse contributions into a cohesive whole, while maintaining their distinctive identities.
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INCITE: Digital Art and Activism features contributions by B.D. Owens, Donna Holford-Lovell, Elaine Shemilt, Ellie Harrison, Emile Shemilt, Eve Mosher, Gair Dunlop, Giulia Casalini, Hadi Mehrpouya & Duncan Nicoll, Iliyana Nedkova, John Butler, Jon Blackwood, Joseph DeLappe, Laura Leuzzi, Maja Zećo, Malath Abbas, Martin Zeilinger, Moza Almatrooshi, Niya B, Tom De Majo (Biome Collective), Va-Bene Elikem Fiatsi, Zoyander Street.
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This project would not have been possible without the generous support of The Royal Society of Edinburgh, Abertay University, DJCAD at the University of Dundee, Delfina Foundation, Gray's School of Art at RGU, SARAS, Sapienza Università di Roma, SGSAH (Scottish Graduate School for Arts and Humanities) and NEoN Digital Arts Festival, Dundee.
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"date_published": "2023-12-09T21:54:00+00:00",
"url": "https://blog.zoyander.cc/2023/12/09/incite-digital-arts-and-activism.html",
"tags": ["announcements","publications"]
},
{
"id": "http://zoyander.micro.blog/2023/11/15/worlds-in-play-conference.html",
"title": "Worlds in Play conference",
"content_html": "\n
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.
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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.
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🌏Worlds in Play 🪩
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Jan 3-7 | ASU Media and Immersive eXperience (MIX) Center
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Join me at Worlds in Play, a five-day gathering of play practitioners—game and theatre artists—exploring new forms of agency in storytelling and experience.
Jan 3-5 | Workshops | 3 days of deep dive sessions
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Choose-your-own-adventure through deep-dive workshops! A special invitation to all hardcore play practitioners and newcomers alike. Step into the artist’s studio as they develop new participatory work, and play a role in the making-of. Dive into intensives on creating experiences with agency at the center!
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Jan 6-7 | Summit | weekend festival & conference
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40+ participatory sessions throughout Saturday & Sunday celebrates a kaleidoscopic community of practitioners, researchers, producers, and entrepreneurs across game, theatre, and other immersive fields. Sessions include immersive performances, transmedia installations, games for solo players & games for hundreds of players, to killer parties and life-changing rituals.
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"date_published": "2023-11-15T16:22:00+00:00",
"url": "https://blog.zoyander.cc/2023/11/15/worlds-in-play-conference.html",
"tags": ["art technology","games","events","announcements"]
},
{
"id": "http://zoyander.micro.blog/2023/10/05/social-model-amp.html",
"title": "Social Model \u0026 More Festival",
"content_html": "\n
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.
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.
\n\n\nImage of schedule for Sightlines Festival - screen reader friendly details are available on sightlinesfestival.co.uk\n\n\n
I'm on the Friday 13th October 5pm panel on Neuroqueerness and Performance, and the Saturday 14th October 1pm Chronic Illness and Theatre panel.
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.
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. The blue gradient is a limited edition and stocks from the supplier are low, so get them while they're still around!
Tbh I'm mostly doing this because I want this phrase on a shirt, but hey if it helps to promote and fundraise my dream project that's a bonus, right?
Assigned Earth at Birth is an interactive online-hybrid play inspired by Temple Grandin's analogy that being an alien anthropologist. What would you do if you realised you were sent here to research humans and report back to your homeworld? The audience will shape how the main character responds, using a web app.
As a non-binary trans person, to me the phrase \"assigned earth at birth\" is intentionally ambiguous. We always owe a duty to our stories, and our lives are shaped by where we've come from, even as we also work every day to transform our circumstances. Earth is our solid ground and our basis for solidarity.
This is hopefully the first in a series of stories about the Transdimensional Research Institute. Learn more at Intrapology.com.
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. If London is not too far away for you, it would mean the world to see you there.
Tickets are £5 (which all goes into a communal pot) and gets each person two things: soup, and a vote.
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During the evening, 5 people pitch their ideas to everyone on how to spend the communal pot. Everyone gets to ask a few questions, discuss the pitches over dinner, then vote on which pitch they think should receive the money. The results are counted, and the winner gets the money to support their idea.
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Doors are open from 6pm; pitches will be heard from 7pm and soup served from around 7.30-7.45pm.
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"date_published": "2023-08-21T14:38:02+00:00",
"url": "https://blog.zoyander.cc/2023/08/21/interactive-soup-th.html",
"tags": ["events","announcements"]
},
{
"id": "http://zoyander.micro.blog/2023/07/07/social-model-amp.html",
"title": "Social Model \u0026 More Festival November 2023 - Assigned Earth at Birth, Intrapology",
"content_html": "\n
I'm thrilled to be working on an interactive play for the Social Model & More Festival at Theatre Delicatessen this November.
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'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.
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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. If you think you'd like to support something like that, please check out the Patreon waitlist page for the project.
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"date_published": "2023-07-07T13:39:19+00:00",
"url": "https://blog.zoyander.cc/2023/07/07/social-model-amp.html",
"tags": ["events","announcements"]
},
{
"id": "http://zoyander.micro.blog/2023/05/09/event-with-no.html",
"title": "Event with No Fun Collective, Prague",
"content_html": "\n
Date: 13.05.2023 Beginning: 18:00
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FREE ENTRY / IN ENGLISH
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etc. galerie z.s. Sarajevská 68/16 Praha 2 120 00 Czech Republic IČ: 22738924
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The project was financially supported by the City of Prague, the State Cultural Fund, and the Ministry of Culture of the Czech Republic.
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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. I'm rather sad to be unable to join in Prague, but very excited to be trying out a new format for this event - Cis Penance will be performed live, with an actor reading out the dialogue!
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More details about the event available here: [etcgalerie.cz/en/perfor...](https://etcgalerie.cz/en/performativni-prednaska-cis-penance-live/)
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.
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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.
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The problem
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In 2022 I acquired new disabilities impacting my vision, mobility, and cognition, and was diagnosed with Multiple Sclerosis. At the height of my MS attacks I was not able to play the fringe indie games that used to be the centre of gravity of my practice, because they tend not to have built in text-to-speech or voice acting. Real-world art spaces are now much harder for me to access, because in addition to mobility problems, MS causes severe fatigue, and the disease modifying treatment suppresses my immune system.
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On top of that, the visual arts sector is extremely chaotic, perhaps even moreso than indie games festivals. As an artist in that space, you are often having to roll with the punches, pick up the slack, and pull a few all-nighters to make things happen at short notice. Frankly, doing that kind of thing when you have MS is a great way to get permanent brain damage. One thing I have going for me is an existing connection to online digital spaces - doubling down on that, and really investing in online culture, seems like the best way to protect my health while staying creative.
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However, the digital arts world as a whole seems to be covered in a foul stink, as a lot of artists whom I used to admire have gleefully gotten their hands dirty in the NFT bubble. I generally try to turn this kind of feeling of frustration or disgust into a positive, by identifying what I want to turn my attention towards in the process of turning away from the thing I dislike. The low-tech web and small internet has been a huge source of inspiration and solace, and I was excited to learn some new skills in that area. This too became inaccessible to me during the months when my eyes were not working properly - I need to create working practices that will allow me to nourish this interest even when MS switches things up on me.
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There are also a bunch of things making my work less accessible to others than it could be - for example, the Interactive Portraits project is fairly exclusionary to visually-impaired people because of the 8-bit Pico-8 font, while a lot of my written work suffers due to my irritating proclivity to become sesquipedalian when left unsupervised. It would be nice to have some sort of a handle on how to balance the creative joy of mess and ambiguity with the inclusive benefits of universal design.
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The plan
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I aim to spend time improving my skills by studying accessible web design and game design, and building relationships with people who have valuable perspectives on this issue. I also aim to make my practice more accessible to collaborators, peers, and audiences, by learning how to create plain language versions of my work. Working with some mentors whom I really admire, I intend to carry out audits and revisions to four of my prior projects in order to make them more accessible.
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Text-to-speech will play an important role in making my work more accessible. However, no existing text-to-speech service is suitable for my work, because they are structured by normative assumptions of binary gender. It is possible to create custom voices, but they are resource-intensive and expensive due to their use of neural networks. I therefore hope to learn how to make a custom synthetic voice the old-fashioned way, which produces robot voices that sound less natural but that could probably run on a potato. This would be based on my own voice, which is (for better and for worse) fairly androgynous, and also has the benefit of representing me as the artist rather than being something that I'm imposing on the people my non-fiction work represents.
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I want to share as much of what I learn and make as possible - one way that I plan to do this is by starting a new podcast, which will include interviews with mentors as well as reflections on what I'm learning as I go along.
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I'll finish this off by giving a massive thanks to Arts Council England for giving me a chance, and to everyone who helped me to put together the application for this grant. It's almost a year to the day since my immune system crashed into my brain stem and sent a flurry of chaos my way, and it means everything to have an opportunity to explore the perspective offered by this weird disease.
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"date_published": "2023-03-28T18:58:24+00:00",
"url": "https://blog.zoyander.cc/2023/03/28/dycp-award.html",
"tags": ["announcements"]
},
{
"id": "http://zoyander.micro.blog/2022/11/21/essay-jams-and-collaborative-writing.html",
"title": "Essay Jams and Collaborative Writing as a Community Event",
"content_html": "\n
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.
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. His thinking was that a zoonotic virus would challenge us to reconsider the harms caused by intensive agriculture, and lead to new laws banning the worst excesses of the industry. Why that didn't happen in our timeline is a question that would probably take a lot of unpacking.
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"date_published": "2022-11-15T19:11:00+00:00",
"url": "https://blog.zoyander.cc/2022/11/15/imaginary-papers-issue.html",
"tags": ["announcements","publications"]
},
{
"id": "http://zoyander.micro.blog/2022/11/07/interactive-portrait-cushions-at-bitbash.html",
"title": "Interactive Portrait Cushions at BitBash Chicago / Chicago Humanities Festival",
"content_html": "\n
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.
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. As well as thinking about how to make a website feel tactile, like a zine table in a community space, I was also thinking about Olia Lialina's 1996 net art piece My Boyfriend Came Back From The War, which kind of feels like it sits at this intersection between personal memories and the structuring institutions of the state. I approached this project considering about how I might make something similar today using the kind of web coding that I'm more familiar with, while ensuring that the code is accessible to others who want to add more material in the future, without using a CMS.
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The site is hosted on Neocities, which is a platform for hand-built, DIY websites that often have a retro aesthetic. If you're a Neocities user, you can follow the site to see future updates. It's such a delight to be asked to make something by people who are down with this kind of lo-fi \"yesterweb\" approach. It's pretty liberating to make a web site that won't have any pop-ups asking users to consent to cookies, isn't built with proprietary tools that will be deprecated in the future, etc. The ethos of Neocities is about building community through self-made, low-cost pieces of media art, which seems pretty zine-like to me.
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Massive thanks to Studio Voltaire for trusting me and going along with this unconventional way of commissioning and building a website! It's a huge honour to play a part in a project that aims to contribute to ongoing access to community care for transgender people.
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. Please give it your support:
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. Huge thanks!
The Bank is a dedicated hub for talent development; this is the second cohort to be supported by Sheffield Theatres.
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The artists will be offered bespoke support, training, artistic opportunities and professional development. The three directors are: Callum Berridge, Shreya Patel and Alexandra Whiteley, who will enjoy a host of opportunities including working as an assistant director on a Sheffield Theatres’ production. The three producers are: Beck Gadsby, Lydia Harrison and Katrina Woolley, who will receive mentoring, as well as seed funding to develop an idea, event or production using The Bank as their base, drawing on the support of the producing team at Sheffield Theatres. The three writers are: Nicole Joseph, Jasmin Mandi-Ghomi and Chloe Wade, who will benefit from masterclasses and mentoring as well as having the opportunity to undertake a research and development process with their writing. The four remaining artists each work in different theatre-based disciplines: Tommo Fowler is a dramaturg, Jennifer Jackson is a theatre maker and movement director / choreographer, Jose Guillermo Puello is a sound designer / composer and Zoyander Street is an artist-researcher and theatre maker. They will all receive tailored support in their fields.
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.
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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. Find out more and get a free ticket (in person or online) here.
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Site Gallery, Sheffield, S1 2BS
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Sat 4th December 2021
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For the final event in the Feminist Data Set workshop series with digital resident Caroline Sinders, we are pleased to welcome Caroline to Sheffield for a special in-person event at Site Gallery.
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Since July, Caroline has been working with Site Gallery to bring new voices to the Feminist Data Set project, through online workshops with Site Gallery audiences and discussion sessions with a selection of special international guest speakers. For this session, Caroline is joined by Rotherham-based artist Zoyander Street, who will share insights into their own research and practices and how they intersect with the interests of Feminist Data Set.
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Feminist Data Set is a multi-year project that interrogates every step of the AI process that includes data collection, data labeling, data training, selecting an algorithm to use, the algorithmic model, and then designing how the model is then placed into a chat bot (and what the chatbot looks like). Every step exists to question and analyze the pipeline of creating using machine learning—is each step feminist, is it intersectional, does each step have bias and how can that bias be removed?
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"date_published": "2021-11-30T17:32:00+00:00",
"url": "https://blog.zoyander.cc/2021/11/30/caroline-sinders-feminist-data-set.html",
"tags": ["events","announcements"]
},
{
"id": "http://zoyander.micro.blog/2021/09/30/squinky-collab-live.html",
"title": "Squinky Collab live performance next week!",
"content_html": "\n
The interactive live performance of my collab project with Squinky is next week, and tickets are still available! Details below.
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About this event
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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’.
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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. Expect some big feelings, uncomfortable silences, and unsolicited rants about queerness and neurodiversity.
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While this show encourages interaction, there is no pressure to speak on camera. Audience members can just type in the specially designed online platform to influence the course of events!
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The show will be followed by approximately 30 mins of informal discussion with the artists and Andro and Eve, and with space for folk to connect and share their thoughts.
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TICKET INFO:
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£10 + booking fee or £15 + booking fee for Solidarity Tickets. Discounted tickets (£5) available for those on low incomes.
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. Details here!
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In the CSI Skill Tree series, we examine and celebrate how video games envision possible futures, build rich and thought-provoking worlds, and engage people as active participants in unfolding and interpreting stories.
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For our latest event, we’ll take a close look at Kentucky Route Zero, a magical realist adventure game about a secret, paranormal highway running through the caves beneath Kentucky. The game was released in five “acts” between 2013 and 2020, and it takes a mind-bending artistic and philosophical approach to themes of labor, debt, alienation, rural disinvestment, automation, the collision of the digital and physical worlds, and how history haunts our experience of the present and our possible futures.
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Our special guests are Zoyander Street, an artist, researcher, critic, and ethnographer who works on video games, media art, and other (mis)uses of technology, and 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.
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The event will be broadcast live on Zoom, and is free and open to everyone—register today!
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!
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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.
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Are you LGBTQ+ and living in South Yorkshire? Then get involved with our photo challenge!
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To enter our photo challenge all you need to do is to take a photo on your phone or camera.
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Entries close on midnight on Sunday 1st August.
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The photo challenge entries will be judged by South Yorkshire creatives, Nelly Naylor, Yuen Fong Ling, and Zoyander Street.
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The winner will receive a bumper pack of goodies from local independents including Vulgar Vintage, Showroom Cinema, Birdhouse Tea, Beer Central, Truffle Pig Vegan and Artisan and Eco. There’ll also be prizes for runners up too from Moss and Clover florists and treats by Elly Joy.
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Winners announced in early August. Have fun and good luck!
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!
\n\n",
"date_published": "2021-05-21T16:36:08+00:00",
"url": "https://blog.zoyander.cc/2021/05/21/joining-neons-trustees.html",
"tags": ["announcements"]
},
{
"id": "http://zoyander.micro.blog/2021/05/08/raju-rage-with.html",
"title": "Raju Rage with the Right Lube: Desperate Living",
"content_html": "\n
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:
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“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.”
The Studio Voltaire page for the Desperate Living programme shows Raju Rage's 2017 video collage Pyramid Revealed By A Sandstorm, an immersive, layered, textured piece of video art meditating on hormones as a kind of meeting point between the body and big sociotechnical structures.
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If you are a trans or non-binary person considering self-medding, harm reduction workshops are available as part of the Desperate Living programme, which you can learn more about by following @raju_rage on Instagram.
![\"Installation:](\"https://blog.zoyander.cc/uploads/2026/caroline-sinders-granted-3.webp\")
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\n",
"date_published": "2026-10-15T15:18:26+00:00",
"url": "https://blog.zoyander.cc/2026/10/15/strap-up-trans-masc-erotic.html",
"tags": ["events","announcements"]
},
{
"id": "http://zoyander.micro.blog/2026/10/12/lumen-prize-nomination-for-granted.html",
"title": "Lumen Prize nomination for Granted",
"content_html": "![\"Tall](\"https://blog.zoyander.cc/uploads/2026/transdigitalarchiving-square-text.png\")
![\"Tall](\"https://blog.zoyander.cc/uploads/2026/transdigitalarchiving-tall-text.png\")
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![\"Screenshot](\"https://blog.zoyander.cc/uploads/2026/screenshot-20260907-171935.png\")
\n",
"date_published": "2026-09-07T16:32:45+00:00",
"url": "https://blog.zoyander.cc/2026/09/07/stone-butch-blues-free-audiobook.html",
"tags": ["announcements"]
},
{
"id": "http://zoyander.micro.blog/2026/04/17/ai-and-the-paradox-of.html",
"title": "AI and the Paradox of Agency exhibition",
"content_html": "![\"\"](\"https://blog.zoyander.cc/uploads/2026/media.jpg\")
\n![\"\"](\"https://blog.zoyander.cc/uploads/2026/2fa1053e9f.jpg\")
\n![\"\"](\"https://blog.zoyander.cc/uploads/2026/5a7002d85b.jpg\")
\n![\"\"](\"https://blog.zoyander.cc/uploads/2026/f378cf0b7a.jpg\")
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![\"On](\"https://blog.zoyander.cc/uploads/2026/1000022336.png\")
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"date_published": "2026-01-16T15:07:00+00:00",
"url": "https://blog.zoyander.cc/2026/01/16/website-making-for-trans-health.html",
"tags": ["announcements"]
},
{
"id": "http://zoyander.micro.blog/2024/11/18/is-society-in-the-room.html",
"title": "Is 'Society' in the Room with us Now? | Intrapology S01E02",
"content_html": "\n![\"\"](\"https://zoyander.micro.blog/uploads/2024/1fee177338.jpg\")
![\"Zoyander](\"https://zoyastreet.wordpress.com/wp-content/uploads/2024/09/oe2b3704-4x6-1-3908806913-e1726257295642.jpg\")
![\"A](\"https://zoyastreet.wordpress.com/wp-content/uploads/2024/09/oe2b3512.jpg\")
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![\"\"](\"https://zoyander.micro.blog/uploads/2024/699534719e.jpg\")
![](\"https://zoyander.micro.blog/uploads/2024/389a52902e.jpg\")
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"date_published": "2024-02-28T16:06:00+00:00",
"url": "https://blog.zoyander.cc/2024/02/28/intrapology-at-assemble-festival-scratch.html",
"tags": ["events","announcements"]
},
{
"id": "http://zoyander.micro.blog/2024/02/20/book-launch-for-incite-digital.html",
"title": "Book launch for INCITE: Digital Arts and Activism",
"content_html": "\n![\"\"](\"https://zoyastreet.wordpress.com/wp-content/uploads/2023/12/incite-digital-art-and-activism-launch-social-02-1500x.jpg\")
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![\"\"](\"https://zoyander.micro.blog/uploads/2024/3a4264cc3e.jpg\")
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\n",
"date_published": "2022-10-28T18:15:20+00:00",
"url": "https://blog.zoyander.cc/2022/10/28/desperate-livin-interactive.html",
"tags": ["announcements"]
},
{
"id": "http://zoyander.micro.blog/2022/03/15/bundle-for-ukraine.html",
"title": "Bundle for Ukraine",
"content_html": "\n![\"\"](\"https://zoyander.micro.blog/uploads/2024/5d9c64a073.jpg\")
![\"\"](\"https://cdn.ticketsource.co.uk/images/promoter/banner/53894-16376774795259-m.png\")
![\"\"](\"https://zoyastreet.wordpress.com/wp-content/uploads/2021/09/fad50dvwyaaiagr.jpg\")
![](\"https://androandeve.com/wp-content/uploads/sites/16/2021/06/1203_Andro-and-Eve-Reclaiming-the-Rainbow-Square-Posters-S4.jpg\")
![](\"https://zoyander.micro.blog/uploads/2024/b31a5eea4b.jpg\")
\n",
"date_published": "2021-05-08T09:02:00+00:00",
"url": "https://blog.zoyander.cc/2021/05/08/raju-rage-with.html",
"tags": ["exhibitions","announcements"]
}
]
}
![\"A](\"https://thephotographersgallery.org.uk/sites/default/files/styles/banner_image/public/images/RSE%20Peacock%20Launch.png?itok=riVE_BfJ\")