A performative reading as the character of EM, from my solo GOMA project 'House of Embers'. Placed here as a queer cosmic pessimist and speculative future of a new Glasgow in the year 2222. EM now guards and ruminates amongst the almost empty ruins of the Gallery of Modern Art. Their waking hours are making sure no one touches anything, at all. One little graze could mean disaster for those that are not immune...

Using the fluidity of the live online platform as a performative space to the embrace nuisances and potential connections within queer immateriality, the post apocalypse, speech, auto fiction and a broken webcam.

Queering the Senses has been initiated to explore the intersections, nay, confluence, infusion and unsettling jouissance of multi-disciplinary multidimensional material practices in the arts. Our concern is not only with queerness in communities of making but also queerness in making itself, something akin to the potential rethinking of material practice in relationship to critical thought: thought, not only as a gravitational pull of, and on the body and its dexterity, a spatiotemporal distortion, a blackening of holes from which, once clenched, nothing escapes, no, it’s something more, something akin to the turbulent energy of storm clouds gathering: a gathering up of thoughts, of ideas and the imbuing of matter in our multi-perspectival, multiverse-al ever changing encounter with the work of art: the labour of the
entangled.

With such thoughts in mind (and with what to hand) this summer school will address the queer conceptualisation and performativity of ‘matter’ and ‘mattering’ in art through a series of presentations. You will be invited to respond to a series of presentations and collaborative workshops in which you will get your hands dirty by contributing to the processesof collaborative production, of speaking-thinking-making-writing-musing-singing-dancing-loving-rethinking-rewriting-remaking-in the wild.

This Summer Research Symposium was part of the 'Queering the Senses' Research Platform at the School of Fine Art. Other contributors included Scott Caruth, Jakub Ceglarz, Whiskey Chow, Nicky Coutts, Michelle Hannah and Henry Rogers. The keynote was presented by Prof Johnny Golding from the Royal College of Art.