Towards a Queer Laboratory

In this essay, Ben Spatz offers practical suggestions and considerations for the implementation of a “queer laboratory”: an artistic research space that emphasizes and actively explores the circulation of powers, roles, and identities. These proposals are based on their own practice, which incorporates audiovisual embodied research as well as the critical theorization of embodiment and identity. Ben firstly describes their own journey in performance-based embodied research and shares how their genderqueer and other identities have led them to push against the edges of what currently counts as “performance.” In the next section, Ben shares a set of proposals for designing a queer laboratory—or “laboratory of powers”—in which gender and other identities can circulate across subject/object boundaries. The chapter closes with a consideration of the audiovisual body in the era of digital audiovisual networks.