Image of Queer Urban Composites: Any City or ‘Bellona (After Samuel R. Delany)’

Gender and Sexuality

Queer Urban Composites: Any City or ‘Bellona (After Samuel R. Delany)’

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Lislegaard’s “Bellona” works in different and several media, some discursive and some non-discursive, and plays in at least three perceptible temporalities: the viewer’s body, motion graphics, and sound. “Bellona” is a multimodal installation, composed of a large tilted screen set on an oblique x- and z- angle to the viewer and as the sole object in a room. On-screen, animated architectural images, oversaturated in a color field palate as well as starkly contrasting chiascuro, include a gray-scale visual rendering of combined alphabetic excerpts taken from Delany’s novel and placed on an inset screen mirroring the oblique angle and placement of the primary screen. Meanwhile, heightened ambient noise, vaguely mechanistic and clanking sound effects, low mono-toned music, and a voiceover twice performing the same excerpted text from the novel (as displayed by the inset visual rendering) fill the room with sound waves. One thing becomes clear: there is an enormous variety and amount of discursive and nondiscursive sensation and physical impingement, consciously perceived and not, and the combination of which I will term affect, designed affections. And these affections register and re-register as cognition, recognition, emotion (secondary affect or autoaffection), discursive and non-discursive understanding and experience. Lislegaard’s urban composite works to design a fully material and temporal, a sexy experience. From the point of view of production, I call this designing or coding affections, and from the point of view of reception it offers an actual adaptation or transformation (or sex-ing) of the bodies of participant viewers. These are not separable. These are feminist and queer in the transduction of bodily affects to and in excess of narrative understandings.

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: Ada: A Journal of Gender, New Media, and Technology.,
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English
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Queer
Bellona
Samuel R. Delany
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Article
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