Embodied Bits

Pedro Latas

The Master research “Embodied Bits” concerns how trans-human, post-digital and post-internet ideas relate to my Queer experience. It is, in a nutshell, an ongoing research on how the technological world has spilled over into the biological world and how Queer folks are front and centre when it comes to taking advantage of technological developments in order to realise their identities. The research question is “How do we perform ourselves in the digital realm?”. Though it started as a research on the practicalities and aesthetics of internet/networked-based performances it quickly opened a Pandora’s Box of social inquiry and analysis. Performing ourselves means performing ethnicity, gender, sexuality, cultural identity... There is an inevitability in drawing a direct connection between these topics and how do we, as singular and, paradoxically, plural human beings within ourselves engage with modern day technology. Through technology we are able to build ourselves, to draft new identities, to build again if they no longer suit our needs. As an artistic research, “Embodied Bits” looks into how digital media has influenced human experience and focuses on the experiences of non-normative bodies and identities, in which I include my own. These topics are interlaced with my own compositional and performative work, always informed and inspired by the previously mentioned ideas and historical context.

In 2006, I clearly remember starting to engage with Youtube and its growing “worldwide” community. I remember spending a lot of my days playing Minecraft online, the cracked version of the game because my parents didn’t want to buy me the official one. And I also remember heavily consuming a British YouTube channel “collective” called The Yogscast in which they simply played games online with one another. These situations brought me an exhilarating feeling of belonging. I wasn't sharing the room with the people I was playing Minecraft with, but when working together to build a settlement on a server it felt like I was truly working within a tightly bound group of people with a common goal. I wasn’t directly playing with these Bristol-based YouTubers but still, I felt like I was part of a larger community just by commenting on videos and even starting to recognise some of the names appearing in their comment section. Lastly, I remember when doing gaming livestreams on Twitch became popular and many Youtube channels started livestreaming as part of their normal content. The Yogscast also joined in on this wave of live content creation and I was so happy when, in one of their Christmas special live-streams called

In 2020, I was working on a new piece as part of a collaborative project between Composition students from The Hague and Scenography students from the Academy of Theatre and Dance of Amsterdam. And as we all know everything went kaput in March. Because of Corona we were trying to somehow find a way to keep the project happening so we decided to embark on the adventure of creating a fully online event. This project set me on a path of discovering the beautiful possibilities of the Internet, or generally speaking, Network Music. This type of music-making is based on the creative and artistic application of a computer's network technology. A basic example could be an artist employing network latency as a compositional tool. The work that emerged from this process is discussed further in the Tip of the tongue syndrome chapter. The following year, I continued experimenting with ideas of kinship, community, and embodiment through the prism of (human) networks, in their most general meaning. When I enrolled in the Master's programme I started formalising and researching more deeply the implications, both musical and social, of what it meant to exist in a digital networked world and performing oneself in the digital realm.

Jingle Jam, they said “Hi!” to me from the other side of the screen.

But most important for me was Twitter. Around the time I was 15, the thought that I was part of the Queer spectrum became more present and more concrete. Unfortunately, I lived in a somewhat hostile environment and I couldn’t, or at least didn’t feel safe enough, to put my questions and doubts into speech. Instead, I put them into typed words. On Twitter, I was able to (somewhat) anonymously ask questions and write thoughts. And it felt so freeing to be able to write about it, even with that pesky 140-character limit.¹ I was even able to find a sort of online community. They were a group of Portuguese people that I felt were more understanding and more compassionate towards me than my immediate flesh and blood neighbour, even though I had never seen them in real life. I remember changing my avatar (the way you call “profile picture” on Twitter) from a Pokémon (a Clefairy, I believe) to my own real face. This was, from my perspective, a colossal step towards my personal Queer liberation. All of this online sponsored growth culminated in me gaining the psychological strength to speak about this matter with my real-life friends.