My Words to Lulu10tacles Deep Below the Sea: Monstrous Multitudes & Digital Trans Embodiments
dissertation currently on embargo through 2026, available via UCSD escholarship
~abstract~
Through creative and analytical exploration with/as my collaborator/avatar Lulu10tacles, a Vocaloid artist and synthetic being, we discuss and demonstrate current practices of digital trans embodiment & vocal modulation in digital communities. Virtual manifestations can act as powerful lenses through which to re-conceptualize relations to one’s own body, renegotiating boundaries of the self in both beautifully profound and deeply discomforting ways. Placing topics of race, gender, and capital at the center of discourse regarding digital curation and space-making, we trace threads of musical ancestry that show digital curation as a crucial technology of survival across time & space. In exploring practices in which the separation between self & other are fractured, we investigate what methods can be deployed in the always-online world to realize trans futurist politics in the present.
~committee~
m. myrta leslie-santana (chair)
king britt
amy cimini
sarah hawkins
bt werner