Morphic Rooms is a collaborative collage laboratory founded in 2021 by allison anne (they/them) and Jeremy P. Bushnell (he/him). We produce layered, abstract work that utilizes systematic parameters, creative rule sets, chance operations, and collaborative interplay.We work from a large collection of images, texts, ephemera, and detritus. This heap of cultural accretion represents the inevitable by‐product of the logics of mechanical reproduction, but in it you can also read the long history of ideological social reproduction as well—a history that we seek to trouble.Elsewhere, we have written, The relationship of collage to its source material is always a queer one—a bit oblique, a bit perverse. After all, its primary operation is literally unsettling: we pry something loose from its initial position—its normative context—and we place it somewhere new, where it might not initially seem to fit. We might consider a collage “finished” when the pieces are integrated, when they come together into a new whole, but many collages generate interest by including the occasional hard‐edged juxtaposition, places where the individual pieces don't fit, where they stick out, becoming subject to the pleasures and perils of visibility. Every collage is a queered context.This is not to say that the original contexts—the initial positions and configurations from which our scraps have been liberated—are “natural.” Normative, yes; heteronormative, often; hegemonic, absolutely—but always constructed, always a product of ideology. At its best, collage digs into our culture's enormous corpus of image matter and literally deconstructs it, drawing attention to its artifice, oddity, and subtle violence, and providing glimpses of a utopian alternative. Small portals into a different way of seeing; postcards brought back from the other side. (Morphic Rooms 2022: 38)It is readily evident that cultural image matter has an ongoing interest in the representation of the body, in producing and policing a range of masculinities, femininities, and ambiguities. In our approach to reworking this gendered image matter for these two pieces, we find ourselves deeply influenced by speculative novels of authors like Samuel Delany, Kathy Acker, Joanna Russ, and J. G. Ballard; the visionary theory of authors like Donna Haraway and Paul B. Preciado; the body cinema of filmmakers like David Cronenberg, Kenneth Anger, and Julia Ducournau; and the inventive futurisms of early purveyors of industrial music and visual culture like Cabaret Voltaire and COUM Transmissions—all of which has led us to feeling readily at home in that space where the bizarre becomes familiar.In our two pieces for this issue of TSQ, we began with paper images of bodies and hands that we recompiled with traditional techniques of collage until their gendered messaging grew incoherent, whereupon we submitted them to a further range of our working practices, entangling them with scrawls, digital artifacts, and print residue. The end result does not seek so much to renounce the body through effacement as to reveal the postgendered or even posthumanist body as an expansive, opening platform from which we can interface with (or can “fly” to) a liberatory solidarity with a broader world, in the spirit that scholar Johanna Drucker (2018: 29) operates in when she notes that “individuals are not autonomous agents or bound entities; their porousness and degrees of entanglement are many.”
anne et al. (Sat,) studied this question.