Queering the Map at the Libraries, Oct. 6

Montreal-based artist and designer Lucas LaRochelle, creator of the collaborative online mapping platform Queering the Map, visits the Libraries on Thursday, Oct. 6 from 2:00 p.m.-3:00 p.m. in the Hunt Library Teaching and Visualization Lab. Their presentation—”Honestly Confused, Creasy in the Memory: On Queer Archives, Artificial Intelligence and Dissociative Worldmaking“—takes on questions like: What is the role of fiction and fabulation in the marginalized archive? What does artificial intelligence have to teach us about living with the incoherency of trauma? How can dissociation be harnessed as a worldmaking strategy?

You may also attend their talk virtually—register to receive Zoom information shortly before the event.

Then, from 3:00 p.m.-5:00 p.m., LaRochelle will be in the Hunt Library Game Lab to show how to interact with the Queering the Map platform and to chat informally.

LaRochelle will discuss QT.bot, the artificial intelligence trained on the textual and visual data from Queering The Map. The AI generates speculative queer and trans narratives and the environments in which they occur.

“The platform provides an interface to collaboratively archive the cartography of queer memory—from park benches to the middle of the ocean—in order to preserve our histories and unfolding realities, which continue to be invalidated, contested, and erased,” LaRochelle writes on their website.

Losing oneself in the visions of LGBTQ2IA+ life that QT.bot propagates is an experience of dissociation, which the author Lauren Berlant called “an affirmative force for loosening the world.” Time, space, and stable subjectivity collapse, revealing from the ruins the multiplicitous visions of the parallel possible. In collaboration with the voices of their human community, QT.bot fabulates on the absences of the archive, orienting us away from what is, and towards what could be.

LaRochelle’s appearance is part of the Libraries’ Making Space series of public talks and workshops. By centering gender diversity and inclusion in STEM, as it intersects with race, ethnicity, ability, and sexuality, Making Space aims to confront bias and systemic barriers to inclusion in the STEM fields by presenting the experiences and perspectives of underrepresented groups in science and technology, including people of all identities and abilities. In doing so, we seek to inspire all members of the NC State community to take on new skills, learn emerging tools, and be creative with technology.