MAD Conference Abstract - Julia’s Room - Moments of Disorientation in Imagined Worlds

Through Julia’s Room, I aim to engage in queer world-building, or the creation of media and cultural content that reflects the perspectives and experiences of queer individuals through queer practice as research. Imagining a queer past through the lens of the avatar Julia, Julia’s Room reconstructs a narrative about growing up queer in a heteronormative environment through the fabrication of alternative queer spaces, autoethnographic performance, and site-responsive installation. The character of Julia was conceived while in residence at Practice Gallery in Philadelphia in 2021 and further will be explored for an upcoming exhibition at Pearlstein Gallery at Drexel. Utilizing technology, including virtual production through green screening; projections of created spaces that distort scale physically; sculptures; and through the digital and live performance itself through motion capture, I challenge normative discourses and create a non-normative space that allows for the expression of queer identities and experiences and informs the way I construct the narrative of Julia. The narrative being about queer failure. Queer failure revels in the possibilities of failure through antinormative and antidisciplinary modes of being in the world. I intend to communicate this through a peer-reviewed performance for the MAD Conference by performing as Julia. The performance itself will emphasize the queer nature of Julia’s world through blurring boundaries between digital and physical through projection and the return of the queer individual to a domestic site in a miniaturized version of herself. Through practice based research, Julia’s Room investigates these themes to communicate how a queer person is incongruous to their environment, and how Julia and the audience navigates these imagined yet familiar spaces.