XXXL explores how size, heft, and bulk set our expectations of technology: from infrastructural sublimes to the urge to seamlessly scale, to queer desire and the positions that we perceive the world from. The capability and capacity of technological systems is often seen as desirable and necessary for survival and success. However, as our technological systems scale up, they rely on the increasing extraction of material resources and the entrenchment of power hierarchies, and overlook their impact on affect and emotion. Drawing attention to how relationships of scale and their affect are established and felt, Georgina Voss will investigate how scale can engage and account for new material and cultural assemblages between humans and nonhumans, ecology, and technological infrastructure and systems.

During the residency Voss will develop a new multiscreen installation that brings together artistic understanding and engagement of the “sublime” with promotional material that hypes and speculates about the scaling of technologies. The work will connect to her ongoing research around ideas of scale and will address how protocols, assumptions, and affordances of large-scale technologies shape what can and cannot be seen when accessing the scales they make available. Instead of relying upon conventional understandings of scale to characterise relations between the human, the non-human, and technology, XXXL will explore how size, bulk, and spectacle in technological systems manifests, and open up ways of thinking about scale in terms of connectivity.

Connecting to contemporary issues of climate collapse and big data, Voss’s work will queer relations to complex systems and develop new scales of social and political assemblages.