• DATES

    • TUE 24 – SUN 29 September
      Available On Demand

In my conversations with Jarra Karalinar Steel and Ciwas Tahos (林安琪 Anchi Lin) for BLEED 2024, I was struck by how both their works foreground romance, desire and community, using sensual and digital elements to imagine a sanctuary that is both transcendent and embodied.

That, of course, made me think of sex and the internet — maybe I am always thinking about sex and the internet — and especially of Lex, a text-first queer app that has grown over the last five years from a platform for personals ads (modelled on the back pages of old-school lesbian magazines) to a sort of community noticeboard or queer Twitter. It can be gossipy, claustrophobic and clout-chasing, as any small community can be, and the app is glitchy and uncomfortably commercialised, yet it’s also a digital sanctuary of sorts, especially as other platforms become more openly and violently anti-trans. I have spent a lot of time there and it’s fed me, surprised me, and prompted me to think more succinctly about who I am and what I want, absorbing the economical jargon of vintage personals ads (“ISO” means “in search of”) as well as the contemporary sociolect of overly-online queers. So I have elected to write my responses to love.exe and Finding Pathways to Temahahoi in the style of Lex posts – 300-character bursts of desire, intention and invitation, in the IRL and URL.

Posts

defrag me

a force eject left me scrambled and sore. I used to be so sure of myself, what happened to that? now my whole system is in disarray and I need a god

memory card full

the night we met was straight out of a Nora Ephron meet-cute. it felt like fate, a doorway to HEA. I remembered every frame, squirreling it away to tell our grandkids. well, I played myself – now it's a hi-def nightmare locked in slow motion

d20

roll for initiative, success! roll for ability, not so much. I could handle great leaps of faith but I couldn't clear the hurdles. & you took my daring for arrogance & I took your caution for selfishness & we were so, so good at seeing the worst in each other

vampires r hot tho

the thing is, I liked you draining me. I liked feeding you. I took pride in how much I could give, how much I could endure, how I could be so strong and generous. a fresh treat dripping from your pretty pointy teeth

wishlist

Steam says my fave genre is "choices matter". it's a cheap thrill but a welcome one to imagine my input might mean something here

game tree

the thing is, everything I loved about you was real too. and in some obstinate corner of my mind there's a hidden branch, a secret ending where everything worked out

reload

wish this were a game so I could replay from that one save point, over and over
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