ABOUT
This project explores the opportunities, challenges, and ethics of creating archives of memory through trans-feminist and queer approaches to virtual reality design practice. Guided by trans-feminist and queer phenomenologies and sensory analyses, this virtual reality-based archive archive entitled “Bisexual Bedroom Imaginaries" assembles digitized objects, spaces, drawings, and texts from personal collections of queer-coded ephemera acquired from two decades of adolescence into early adulthood. Through a critical analysis of my own practice as informed by sensory analyses of other seminal trans-feminist and queer VR works—including Jordan Tannahill’s 'Draw Me Close,' Dylan Paré’s 'Queer & Trans Narratives in Virtual Reality,' and Seanna Musgrave’s 'Animal Massage'—this project theorizes a queer virtual reality world-making practice radically opposed to the promissory aims of full body immersion as pursued by design teams positing VR as an “empathy machine.” Its attendant research leverages queer and feminist phenomenology, performance theory, and archival scholarship towards a vision of a queer virtual reality design practice informed by partiality, hybridity, possibility, creativity, and play—one which does not seek to project trans-feminist-queer experience onto its audiences, but create space for subjective queer readings and counter-readings, interpretations, sensations, and resonances within virtual worlds.

DEVELOPMENT HISTORY
This project began at the 17th Ammerman Centre Biennal Symposium on Arts and Technology (2022), facilitated with guidance and technical support from Daniel Lichtman and his Community Game Development Kit. It was further developed into working prototypes during a graduate fellowship with the Centre for Culture and Technology (2023), and worked into a chapter of SSHRC-CGS-funded doctoral research at the University of Toronto (2024). An early prototype was published in the Hyperrhiz 27: New Media Cultures peer-reviewed journal, specifically in the "Blanket Forts and Other Assemblages" Special Issue, edited by Lichtman et al. An expanded article of theory and practice, entitled "Crafting 'Bisexual Bedroom Imaginaries': Queering Virtual Reality Design Practice," has been accepted to (and is forthcoming in) Women & Performance: a journal of feminist theory.