Urbana Campus Research Calendar (OVCRI)

“As Usual You Have Produced Yet Another Installment Worthy of Archiving”: The Persistence of Obsolescence in Queer Information & Media Technologies

Queer communities are early adopters of emergent technologies, whether video cameras to document the HIV/AIDS epidemic or microblogging platforms like Tumblr to explore new identity categories. Yet the same technologies queer communities foster are subject to the most rampant obsolescence, making the formats of these objects difficult to preserve & make accessible. As a question of archival materials, queer history seems inextricably linked to obsolescence. In this talk, Dr. Travis Wagner (they/them) asks, what might it mean to take this question of queer archival obsolescence seriously? 

Through a series of archival object case studies, Wagner will call attention to how data exists within the objects of queer history, how they represent the circulation and use of information within queer communities in their historical moments, & how they pose challenges to ensuring their long-term preservation. Wagner will interrogate the sociotechnical nature of queerness & obsolescence as co-constitutive forces & argue that obsolescence can serve as a generative tool to think about the past, present, & future of queer archives in an age where the promises of technology seem limitless, yet prove deeply biased & exclusionary.

The “Media Necromancy” speaker series unearths what Alan Liu describes as “the déjá vu haunting of new by old media”—the many ways that historical media technologies are woven into the design, function, and reception of newer media technologies.

Sponsored by Skeuomorph Press & BookLab, each talk in the series traces one such entanglement, showing how rich media archeologies can help scholars better understand, contextualize, analyze, and design information systems.