Homay King

Andrew W. Mellon Regional Fellow in the Humanities

20102011 Forum on Virtuality

Homay King

Associate Professor, History of Art, Bryn Mawr College

The Dream of the Virtual: Digital Frontiers and the Flight from Earth

Dreams of the Virtual is a book about how we imagine digital media: the fantasies and narratives that we project onto virtual space, and how questions of race, class, gender and lived subjectivity map onto virtual worlds and manifest in the digital age. The project is structured around an analogy between digital space and the historical American west. Through analysis of works of electronic visual media, this project explors the exclusions, exploitations, and myths that underlie the fantasy of a limitless, open, and flat digital frontier, taking into account both utopic and dystopic aspects of digital culture.