Research readings- 08.12.

22

Looking at queer spaces in Camden Ben Campkin and Lo Marshall:

N- highlighting the importance of the LBGTQ spaces within London, how do these spaces give protection
Q- Forming ‘a vitally important social and cultural infrastructure within these communities as part of
individuals’ strategy for resilience’. P2

N- The decline of LGTBQ spaces

Q- ‘The evidence we have gathered suggests that the number of LGBTQ+ nightlife venues in Camden fell
by 40% between 2006 and 2018. This is still lower than the 58% decrease across London as a whole’. P4

N- Reasons for the closure of LGBTQ spaces can be attributed to a multitude of factors. The reasons for
closure are often unavailable, requiring detailed research to ascertain. The ones whose reasons have
been known have included:

Q- ‘Transport and infrastructure redevelopment, including direct and indirect impacts of King’s Cross
Central redevelopment; and Cross rail Tottenham Court Road station redevelopment, where the loss of
one LGBTQ+ space was considered in equalities impact assessments yet multiple venues closed.

- Conversion or partial conversion to residential

- Sale of property
- Lease expiration and failure to renegotiate viable terms/rent increases including rent spikes
- Financial issues/business viability. -Why is business viability being an issue at a time where so
many people are out and expressing homosexuality so publicly???

N- A method by which institutions are to be preserved will be based on the ‘use class’ of the institution.
This aims to protect the queer spaces, highlighting the importance they hold in diversifying the area,
maintaining the presence and protecting marginalised institutions.

Regan Ramos: https://www.ucl.ac.uk/bartlett/architecture/regner-ramos

PHD – abstract and introduction

Instagram mapping the Caribbean Islands through Queerness: https://www.cuirtopia.xyz/

Dissertation subject will be looking at the methods by which:

‘This dissertation seeks to situate the current spatio-temporal condition of the modern-like cyborg-citizen
within the built environment’.

N- Looking at the methods in which people deploy technology within their everyday lives. The methods by
which they’ve forged a ‘cyborg’ way of functioning.
Q- ‘From man’s dependency on technology, to the cyborg’s portrayal in sci-fi cinema; from gender
differences to notions of the abject, the cyborg has cunningly found its relevancy into this research and
back into the twenty-first century.’

Contacting the PHD student, is there a way of sending the

Narrowing down the research methods and the questions being proposed for the project??

Structuring the presentation

Questions:

The changes experiment in the queer geography of London? – too broad needs to be narrowed down

The impact sexuality has on the Queer community?? –

The method by which being ‘gay born online’ has on the participants of the community and the ways in which it’ll
shape its future.

READING 2

‘Grindr Archiurbanism’ by Andres Jaque

Log
November 3rd, 2017, No. 41, pp. 75-84
ISBN: 9780990735298
Copyright © The Author(s). All Rights Reserved.
Published by Anyone Corporation

- Looking at the inner working of Grindr and the methods by which it has monopolized and revolutionised
the gay hook up scene. The director of the app is the former Playboy executive Landis Smithers.
-
- Q- ‘the app unfolded as an transmedia and interscalar atchiurbanism that succeeded in coordinating
online interaction, real estat, fashion, urban transformation and interior design as a mean to dequeer
gayness, commodify sex and transform bodies into vehicles of market acceleration’. P1 Abstract.

N- One of the precursors to the internet, Minitel, began to develop its own digital language for online dating.

N- NEW REASOURCES

1. https://www.theguardian.com/media/2010/jul/04/grindr-the-new-sexual-revolution.
2. Joel Simkhai, “An encounter with Joel Simkhai, founder of Grindr,” interview by Philip
Utz, Numéro, August 25, 2016, http://www.numero.com/en/culture/culture-encounterjoel-
simkhai-founder-grindr.

3. Jeff Ferzoco, The You-City: Technology, Experience & Life on the Ground (San
Francisco: Outpost19, 2012).
N- In 2008, apple, Samsung and Nokia were launching vell phones with GPS, this same year Simkhai, Morten Bek
Ditlevsen, and Scott Lewallen developed the first version of a location-based application that they called Grindr. P3

N- The activation of the archiubranism, orchestrated by the grindr experience.

Q- ‘Grindr is a zone of its own. It is not a city. Whereas cities are often seen as places for social convergence, Grindr
is a device that sorts out the social, an infrastructure rendering its users as selected members of a specialised
community within society. It is enacted more than constructed. It is not virtual nor is it only digital. It is an
archiurbanism that- evolving from the long running traditions of queer urban lacunas where normativity was
challenged, and cruising strangers became possible- has reinvented the offline domain.’ P5

N- Grindr Statistics, size of the app, rate at which it is increasing.

Q- Proximity today is still important, it is multiple, selective and technologically manageable. With 10 million users
in 192 countries and growing at a rate of 10,000 Downloads per day. Pg 6

N- The western dequeering of gayness- Sex and real estate

N- Looking at the abandon of Queer spaces in London by the younger demographic, venues such as ‘The Black Cap
and ‘Joiner’s Arms’. They were both demolished to make way for new apartment blocks.

N- The shifts experimented within the ‘Gay sexuality’, the privacy of the meet up meant the interaction would start
to happen in more affluent areas, the most active areas would become, Chelsea, East Harlem and Greenpoint. The
erotic industries usually occupy the deprived areas of a city. In contrast popular adult stidios like Burning Angel or
Cocky Boys, used post industrial lofts and floor to ceiling windows as their back drops. Bringing a glamour and
design to the gay adult entertainment industry. Pg 8

‘Self designing as Shelter : Social Media

N- The use of the location-based apps can also prove to be incredible dangerous, placing its users in a vulnerable
position, if they are to be tracked or lured into a trapping situation.

Fashion, porn and interior Design: social media Is where people are now

N- The commodification of Queerness, homosexuality being exploited as a marketing scheme.

Q- In May 2015, Grindr had initiated a ten-month/ten-step integral reconstruction, orchestrated to turn the app
into an expanding milieu for an immersive lifestyle experience.

Step one: Grindr hired Raine Group LLC to find a buyer so the company could
raise capital for development. Eight months later, in early January 2016, Grindr sold 60
percent of its stake to the Chinese gaming company Beijing Kunlun Tech.31

Step two: Lukas Sliwka, Grindr’s chief technology officer, launched a new Grindr
software stack. Initially, Grindr’s digital infrastructure was composed of customized
solutions, which compromised their in-house engineers’ time since only they could do

Step three: the appointment of the previous Playboy executive, as a vice president.

Q-‘The app, ‘Grindr, with 10 million users, was valued at 155 million when BK acquired its majority share’. Pg 14
N- looking to expand the user experience, incorporating new features and including special deals.
Q-During London Fashion Week in January 2016, Grindr gave its users a code to
access an exclusive live-stream of J.W. Anderson’s Autumn/Winter pg 14

Q- In many Western cities, Grindr is in part both the cause and effect of the
displacement of queer urban space by condominium towers. Pg 16.

READING 3

‘Sex in the digital city: location based dating apps and queer urban life’.

Description of the article: This article contributes to current thinking on technological hybridisation and
sexuality and space studies by finding out how locative app use impacts on user experiences of daily life in the
contemporary city. Using interviews conducted with 36 non-heterosexual men living and working in London,
UK.

Relevant cited readings:

1. Kitchin, Rob, and Martin Dodge. 2011. Code/Space: Software and Everyday Life. Cambridge, MA:

2. Gross, Larry. 2007. “Foreword.” In Queer Online: Media Technology and Sexuality, edited by Kate
O’Riordan and David Phillips, 7–11. New York: Peter Lang.

N- introducing the topic of technological hybridization. Technology becoming a fundamental

element of the everyday life, stretching beyond the different faculties, and giving way to a
merged ‘cyborg’ method of living.
Q- ‘Mobile and pervasive technologies are becoming seamlessly incorporated into daily routines, resulting in
an internet more closely laid onto ‘real’ life than ever before’ pg 3-4.

N- Main findings of the study:

1. changing imaginings of community and sociality

2. The liberation and limitations of technology

3. A shift from queer publics to private space.

N- Samuel Delany, argues in his study of New York’s Times Square (1999), looking at the ‘contact’ socializing crucial
to building and maintaining liveable communities has been progressively overtake in urban street life by
‘networking’. People with the same interests will meet and then further those interests, the space and opportunity
for the colliding of different views/interests Is minimized in a world of ‘networking’.

Q- ‘The spontaneous sociability of chance encounter is replaced by networking, inhibiting the potential
for queer communities built on physical co-presence.’

N- Though these online communities forming similar ‘ghetto’ structures, as they can form assuring ‘bubbles’ for
marginalized communities. How might this growing presence in the online community detract from the physical
encounters and communities? These new technologies may broker NEW Queer landscapes, one that bridge the
physical and the digital, forging a hybrid.

N- The development of hybridization ‘allows humans to attend the physical and virtual environments
simultaneously, often leading to richer and more efficient interpersonal connection’. Pg 5

N- ‘The commodification of intimacy, committed relationships are replaced by fleeting connections’ pg5
KEEP READING THE 3RD READINNGGGG GOOD STUFF, QUOTE LOTS OF THE INTERVIEWS AS A FORM OF EVIDENCE,
NO NEED TO SEEK YOUR OWN INTERVIEW IN THIS CASE.

N-The participants argue the presence of ‘community’ within the online apps. The differences lying within the
commonalities in identity seems to present one of the issues, though the majority have similar intentions and
reasons for being on the app.
Q-‘The Graham seems to exist in tension with a narrative of self-interest on Grindr that suggests sociality in only
offered by users in expectation of a reward in the form of physical encounter. Yet Community was frequently felt
as a familiarity with local spaces and inhabitations rather than either conceptual like mindedness or physical
congregation in queer coded space and this iteration, the apps were helpful. Pg 10.

N- Though the apps may not seek to form communities they ‘do foster informal networks for social cohesion’.pg10

N- The apps encourage constant usage, being able to connect anywhere and at any time, scanning kilometers at a
time. The users are therefore able to examine hundreds of potential partners in a matter of minutes. The statistical
probability of finding a partner is higher yet the positives are ‘mitigated by unsatisfying real-life encounters. Pg 10

N- The apps are acknowledged as ‘distancing’ the user from the real world, reducing the likelihood of the person
meeting via chance encounter.
Q- ‘Each app you have is another platform from which you distance yourself from the real physical, engaged world
you inhabit. And I don’t really use either of them that much but the platforms I have, I guess for me that’s me
confirming my desire to disassociate from the real world, which isn’t something I necessarily want to do. Pg 12

N- For most of the participants the apps work best when used to broker physical encounters, giving way to
embodied meetings.

N- The complication between the private/public and the stranger.

Q- ‘Locative apps allow new forms of queer space production that can be adapted according to the personal
preferences of users.
Q- people ‘perceive less risk in hosting’. ‘Participants in this study overwhelmingly interpreted their homes as
private and secure spaces. They met men for sex at either their own or their match’s homes for what they argued
was a convenience but considered what this meant for their domestic space and safety, often at great length.’

N- The essay goes into detail on the process of ‘destrangering’ the match as a method of rationalizing their
presence in such close proximity and against the usual precautions taken when concerning someone’s safety.

READING 4

‘Queer Online: media, technology and sexuality’ by David J. Phillips 2007

Overview: looking at how the internet not only provides a safe space for queers, but also how queers queer the
internet. Detailing how the internet itself is a queer space as it offers a space for trying different identities and
provides ample room for a multitude of voices. In contrast, chapters such as ‘Queering Surveillance Research’ that
the internet is not as queer as it appears, and instead is operating more and more like Foucault’s notion of the
‘panoptican’.

N- establishing the possibility of ‘in-person’ participation of a viewer when dealing with subcultures that otherwise
be out of reach for those beginning or unsure of their interest.

N- Looking at the themes of ‘pass ability’ in the queer community, how some can project the image of
‘straight/femme/gay’ passing on their online profiles, allowing for greater exploration/experimentation.
READING 5

1. https://www.theguardian.com/media/2010/jul/04/grindr-the-new-sexual-revolution.

N- The interview with the developer of grindr clears it from being part of the ‘virtual’ scene, taking the
methods by which people meet as an enabler of physical encounter. The notion that the digital and the
‘hybridisation’ of sex is looking towards the physical whilst existing within the digital disconnects the app
from online dating and the rest.

N- The original nature of encounters which grindr was originally meant to facilitate conflicts those which
its users now use it for.

READING 6

‘Anticipating touch: Haptic geographies of Grindr encounters in Newcastle-upon-Tyne, UK Carl Bonner-

Thompson

From the school of Environment and Technology, Brighton.

N- Looking at the corporal changes experiment in sex, due to the digital meeting point. The ways in
which the method of meeting alters the experience, in particular the sexual experience. The article
addresses the purely ‘hook up’ faculty of grindr meet ups. Looking at the app through the sexual
experience of its users and compares it to that of the non digital meet/interaction.

READING 6

‘Altering Practises’ by Doina Petrescu

READING 7

‘Queer 1950’s Rethinking sexuality in the Post-war years Palgrave Macmillan