Hyperrhiz 27

Bisexual Bedroom Imaginaries

Camille Intson
University of Toronto (St. George) Faculty of Information

Citation: Intson, Camille. “Bisexual Bedroom Imaginaries.” Hyperrhiz: New Media Cultures, no. 27, 2024. doi:10.20415/hyp/027.a04

Abstract: Bisexual Bedroom Imaginaries is a three-dimensional collage created for virtual reality using the Community Game Development Toolkit, created by Daniel Lichtman. The work brings together formative queer objects, spaces, drawings, and texts from its author’s personal archive, collected between the ages of seven and twenty years old. The project invites its audience to witness, or perhaps to immersively “step into,” a subjective experience of queerness that has been curated using virtual reality as an emerging archival tool. Its aim is to explore what “queering” archival practices could look like, leveraging virtual reality as an immersive yet transient medium which engages the physical body as it moves between and across abstract representations of space, time, and personal queer ephemera.

Keywords: bisexual, virtual reality, collage, immersive, game, design studies.

View Project: Bisexual Bedroom Imaginaries

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Artist Statement

Bisexual Bedroom Imaginaries is an immersive collage designed for virtual reality which brings together formative queer spaces, objects, and writings from my adolescence into adulthood. In reimagining the bedroom as a “queered” liminal space—full of desire, intimacy, and secrecy—I have created a “shifting” (Mel Y. Chen 2012) archive of ephemera from various stages of my journey into queerness. From childhood drawings of princesses holding hands to sex toys, queer literature, and surrealist reconstructions of domestic objects, “Bisexual Bedroom Imaginaries” is a three-dimensional exploration of bisexual resonances within the intimate material-discursive spaces of memory, queerness, emerging technology, and the domestic. In designing and inhabiting a performative virtual space comprised of my own intimate queer ephemera—and through considerations of foundational queer, performance, and archival scholarship—this project suggests new ways of preserving, performing, and safeguarding queer materials while emphasizing methods by which memory itself is queered, performed, and displayed.

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