A transdisciplinary artist and educator working at the intersection of art, trans studies, and technology, Chelsea Thompto is an assistant professor of creative technologies at Virginia Tech who has shown and published her work nationally and internationally.
Strongly rooted in her experience as a transwoman, Thompto’s practice is focused on interrogating and resisting bureaucratic and technological systems used to visualize and categorize our world, and the violences they produce and reproduce. Exploring gender identity, while a deeply personal process, is also an increasingly politicized act that informs her making. The prefix trans- is also a tactic and gesture she employs in her studio practice by moving ideas between and across materials and modes of working in order to explore form and concept. Her work spans a variety of media which often include code, video, sound, book making, writing, and sculpture.
This talk will explore the artist’s work in relation to the issues of the future and trans rights. With a focus both on how art can help us imagine new futures and on how we can produce work in the present that is conscious of our current and future climate context, this talk will cover the artist’s recent projects across, code, writing, sculpture, and bookmaking.
