luca lee & DOMINIKA KSEL
2020 Culture Push Fellows, Fellowship for Utopian Practice
Dominika Ksel is an interdisciplinary artist investigating unseen forces that inform our physical and immaterial realities. Through community collaboration, sonic sculptures, VR and video, they use gameplay and interactivity to map power dynamics, research consciousness, embodied cognition and interspecies communication. These inquiries often lead to intimate experimental spaces where science and mysticism reveal the magical possibilities of radical cooperation and deep listening.
Luca Lee is a Brooklyn-based transgender immigrant journalist, experimental media maker, and self-taught musician from Chile, with a research-centered and multidisciplinary practice. He works with new media and immersive arts to create participatory and hybrid experiences that explore questions of identity and otherness.
PROJECT: IN(QUEERIES): VR/AR QUEER HISTORY PROJECT
In(Queeries): VR/AR Queer History Project is a series of educational interactive VR/AR works that create visibility to the erased history of Queer communities in New York City; existing as a web-based experience, and as site-specific, public, immersive installations. In the first phase of our project, we will focus on the Christopher Street Piers and the historical metamorphosis of this once active part of the NYC waterfront economy. We will journey through the political, social, and artistic transformations and histories of the piers – from a vibrant gay scene in the 1960s to 1980s to a permanent gathering for queer Black and Latinx homeless youth in the late 1990s to early 2000s – following the rise of Queer Liberation.
By using immersive technology, we hope to generate a more active civic engagement and interest in the past, in order to initiate conversations, and the possibility for building a future that considers the needs of marginalized people today. Accessibility in new media is a priority, and our ultimate goal is to reactivate the piers as a physical and virtual educational space not only for the LGBTQI+ community, but also for cross-cultural audiences on a local and national level. During COVID-19, when we desire interaction, intimacy and community, our work hopes to provide solace and space for healing. Spreading the joys, sorrows and tales of those whose buried legacy inspired and influenced our art, music, politics and culture.
Lee and Ksel began working on In(Queeries) in 2017 as an investigative platform and conceptual news program that focused on contemporary narratives and (in)formation through the magnification of invisible histories via living archives and dynamic forms of new media such as VR/MR. Our research and art practice is dedicated to the excavation, insertion, reconfiguration and digital currency of the queer paradigm as a space of possibility beyond hierarchy, patriarchy and capitalism.