Interview with Lucas LaRochelle

About This Event:
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.
Through a series of public talks and workshops, this program series centers gender diversity and inclusion in STEM, as it intersects with race, ethnicity, ability, and sexuality.
In 2015, Making Space began as a series of programs focused on highlighting the work of women in STEM.
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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?
This talk will explore these questions in relation to the genesis of QT.bot - an artificial intelligence trained on the textual and visual data of the community-generated counter mapping platform Queering The Map - that generates speculative queer and trans narratives and the environments in which they occur. Losing oneself in the visions of LGBTQ2IA+ life that QT.bot propagates is an experience of dissociation - an affect which the late Lauren Berlant considered “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.
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Lucas LaRochelle is a designer, artist, and researcher whose work is concerned with queer and trans digital cultures, community-based archiving, and co-creative media. They are the founder of Queering The Map, a community generated counter-mapping project for digitally archiving LGBTQ2IA+ experience in relation to physical space.