Browser homepage; with development support from KT DUFFY.
Over the course of 30 days, SPEEDRUNHOME.PAGE presents an HTML/CSS-constructed “speedrun” of queer spaces. Originally commissioned by curator Logan Williams for the exhibition pleasurehome: desiring queer space at the Art Museum, University of Toronto, the artwork is designed as a browser homepage, which the viewer revisits daily, or from time to time. Each day, the artwork offers a refreshed set of poetry, images, and found footage that reflect on how queerness is mobilized in the space of the day — along with the pleasures and discontents — in pursuit of finding “home.” The work takes direct inspiration from Ana Anthropy’s 2008 video game, Mighty Jill Off, a game about a lesbian submissive masochist who runs through dungeons in a tower to please her Queen. Within this line of thinking, SPEEDRUNHOME.PAGE draws on the Girl in the Tower trope of many popular video games and fantasy stories by inviting viewers to reflect on the pleasure of the process as well as the goal. The work reveals how the internet and video games have provided alternative spaces for queer people to explore their desires, roam through virtual lands of different possibilities, and find where they belong.
SHAWNÉ MICHAELAIN HOLLOWAY is a Virginia-based new media artist and poet. Known for her noisy experimental electronics and performance practice, HOLLOWAY shapes the rhetorics of computer programming and sadomasochism into tools for exposing structures of power.