Plaything of an Impossible Dream:
Shu Lea Cheang’s Brandon 30 Years Into the Future
Plaything of an Impossible Dream:
Shu Lea Cheang’s Brandon 30 Years Into the Future
Shu Lea Cheang’s Brandon 30 Years Into the Future
Lauren Lee
I only first encountered Taiwanese artist Shu Lea Cheang’s net art piece Brandon (1998–99) nearly 30 years after the work was created, in the context of its restoration by the Guggenheim Museum in 2017. Cheang conceived of Brandon as a kind of memorial to Brandon Teena (1972–1993), a young Nebraska man who was murdered after being outed as transgender at a party. Brandon was the very first work of net art that the Guggenheim acquired, and since its launch, the work’s sprawlingly interactive nature has come to represent the expansive possibilities that internet art held in the growing World Wide Web of the 1990s. Such a public and institutional restoration of a work of early net art was further significant in the way it challenged the “natural” deterioration of these early pieces as the mechanics of the internet evolved. Without active conservation, net art works become bounded by their original code, glitching and left unviewable. The later institutional enclosure through the restoration of the work is perhaps equally emblematic of Cheang’s intentions to have Brandon act as a memorial, notably one that could preserve Teena’s memory online forever.
Just as Brandon has changed material form since its inception (glitching far into half-use, then total disrepair for years, and then restored again), the cultural discourse around the utopian hopes of both the internet and queer life have shifted from an optimism, to a realism, to—as we currently come up on ten years since the work’s restoration—what seems to be a mix of both pessimism and futurism. What I am interested in is how, after all of these decades, Brandon’s changing form has kept time for our changing hopes for the internet, and the successes and failures of Cheang’s attempt at creating a perpetual, specifically transgender, digital body.
Like many artists in New York at the time, Cheang encountered Teena’s story through an extended feature in The Village Voice by Donna Minkowitz. Just a few months earlier, the newspaper had published A Rape in Cyberspace by Julian Dibbell, also documenting a violent sex crime; but this one took place online in LambdaMOO, an early online multi-user domain (MUD for short, and in essence an online chat room), a novel feature of the early interactive internet. Reckoning with these two acts of violence—one in the real world and one in the digital sphere—Cheang became interested in the increasingly porous borders between the world “IRL” and the world online, and proposed a multi-interface project that would include both live performances and a narrative work meant to live on the internet. This desire was further informed by the fact that Minkowitz’s article wrongly described Teena as a lesbian presenting as a man, a transphobic undergirding heavily criticized by community members and writers like Jack Halberstam and Leslie Feinberg.
At the time of Brandon’s conception, the idea of crossing the digital border in this way—eliding the borders of time and space between real death and online memorial—was revolutionary. It was of course predicated in theory by the likes of Donna Haraway and cyberfeminist scholars of the 1960s, but then, at the precipice of the new century, it was to be coded into reality. The 2017 restoration of Brandon was also landmark, this time for the questions it raised around conservation, of how to reconcile Cheang’s original vision of the work with the necessary maintenance to keep the website up and running: her authorial desire competing with the original code, naturally decaying over time. What caused Brandon to glitch, and what motivated Cheang, her collaborators, and the restoration team to reverse this glitching, despite the difficulty involved?
For Cheang’s practice, the work marked a shift from the world of experimental film and the confines of the screen and of time, or as she has said, from “actual space to cyber/virtual, claiming [herself] a cyber-nomad.” Since her move from Taiwan to New York in the 1980s, Cheang’ practice had focused on gender, sexuality, and desire, largely in the form of video installations such as Those Fluttering Objects of Desire (1992) and narrative experimental films like Fresh Kill (1994). In the mid 1990s, Cheang began to experiment with combining installation, film, and the live internet in Bowling Alley (1995). Her first cybernetic installation, the work connected a Minneapolis bowling alley to the internet through sensor data. Participants bowling changed the output of the video art displayed in one of the Walker Art Center’s gallery spaces. Brandon is a continuation of this cybernetic interest, one importantly characterized by an expanded network, with live events across continents.
For the Guggenheim, Brandon was its first experiment with thinking about the potential of the internet to disregard the borders of sites, times, and their specificities. Early internet art in the 1990s was often framed around the presentation of the hyperlink: a way for users to click and navigate as a spectator. The dominant mode of understanding internet art—thinking here of prominent examples in the electronic literature work of Young Hae Chang Heavy Industries, the game art of artist group Jodi, and Olia Lialina’s My Boyfriend Came Back from the War (1996)—hinged on the cinematic. In these works, viewers clicked their way through, not so much navigating but rather unfolding a predetermined path. Unlike these other viewing experiences, Brandon included features like live streamed portions and a MUD chat that asked users to make decisions on their own terms. Restricting an understanding of Brandon to simply the hyperlinked narrative precludes a kind of interaction that Cheang asks of the user: to consider Brandon as site, body, and memorial.
As Cheang says: “the real Brandon Teena could not cross the border of Nebraska.” I have always been interested in Cheang’s choice of the word “real,” especially in opposition to what she calls the site of Brandon: “digi gender social body.” In her own words, “in terms of ‘Digi Gender’: for me gender is not fixed. ‘Digi’: digital, there you can really free up the concept of gender. And ‘Social Body,’ So for me it’s about this kind of virtual community to create a kind of social body, a social space.” In other words, Cheang sees the digi gender social body as a space, in the form of the internet or net art, to try out new identities, genders, memories, and realities. If the real Brandon Teena existed as a person—in a real, flesh body whose life was violently taken—what does that make the digi gender social body of Brandon? Just as the internet could be an apparatus for violence, it could also be used, in the case of Teena, to sustain his life and memory beyond unjust murder, and towards infinite memory and discernability in the memorializing amoeba of cyberspace. It’s this dream of freedom that sustains the promise of Brandon, the dream of the transcendent digital body.
Brandon was first brought to life initially as a year-long project consisting of the live internet narrative (now found on brandon.guggenheim.org) made up of five interfaces—bigdoll, roadtrip, mooplay, panopticon, and theatrum anatomicum—and three in-person events as installation, commissioned by the Guggenheim, and in conjunction with multiple collaborators, notably Waag Society in Amsterdam. The first interface, bigdoll, serves as an entry into the rest of the website, with a five-by-five tile grid of images including locks, chains, sex toys, and magazine clippings. The selection of images is coded to display at random, with each new visit to the page rearranging the order in which they are shown. Clicking on a few certain tiles in the grid brings the user to the next interface, roadtrip.
Roadtrip is the interface that makes up the “main” landing page of Brandon, where users can explore a literal digital highway, which scrolls up and down automatically, languidly. Moving your cursor activates images that blink on and off the screen: a distorted house, a flashing train car, electrical wiring. Clicking on the various road signs lead you to different corners and interfaces of Brandon. While still within the enclosures of the coded work of Brandon, as you navigate roadtrip, the interface exudes a sense of cautionary freedom: while you can go anywhere along the highway, you are unsure where your clicking might lead. Sometimes it is a flashing video; other times, what might be a digital poem. Clicking on the neon “Brandon’s Place” sign leads to the Google Search page for Brandon Teena—discovery ad infinitum. Other evidence of Teena’s life appears as users navigate the page, from documentation of the investigation of his murder, to works of fiction about Teena’s life had he lived: a collection of archival and speculative material co-curated with trans studies scholar Susan Stryker.
Clicking on the “Detour” sign leads to the interface mooplay, a direct reference to the Dibbell article, where, like in a MUD, you choose your online appearance of name and gender, and chat with the unknown, similarly opaque person on the other end of the chat. The last two interfaces, panopticon and theatrum anatomicum, draw from critical histories of surveillance and freedom; respectively, Jeremy Bentham’s Panopticon prison, and the Waag Society’s physical location of the Theatrum Anatonicum, a Renaissance scientific learning theatre where the public could once watch surgeons dissect corpses, often convicted criminals, in order to advance anatomical research and teach students—repurposed into an art gallery centuries later.
The spirit of cautionary freedom in roadtrip accompanies your navigation of Brandon, where these interfaces and other points of meaning are only found by digging through the links scattered throughout the work, peeling back each layer, retracing your steps. It was the very coded structure of Brandon that worked as an interface for Cheang’s dream of giving this ultimate freedom of movement to Teena.
Only a few years after its creation, these same boundaries also defined Brandon’s future limits, glitching links dead and images nonexistent—an inverse of Cheang’s intention to frustrate its users. From 1998-99, Brandon remained in its original live form on the internet. However, after the project’s initial one-year run, several issues with its original code rendered the work glitchy, obscured, then eventually, unnavigable. As the web found its footing in the new digital age, its rapidly changing form held consequences for Brandon. Changes to both web browsers and operating systems impacted the functionality of the Java applets which powered the site's graphics, broken links, and later, the discontinuation of applet support by Google Chrome and Mozilla Firefox: these glitches rendered the work defunct and deadended in a number of ways. Java applets deteriorated, leaving links to click with no popups, popups with no content, and swaths of error messaging. Brandon existed on the fringes of its own borders.
Eventually, the website had glitched to such an unmanageable degree that in 2002, its files were burned onto a CD-Rom, and the website was completely deleted from the server, remaining solely offline in this physical format until 2005, and largely non-functional until the Guggenheim began the formal process of conservation, congruent with widespread concern of loss of early web culture throughout the 2010s. The project focused on restoring Brandon as close to its original visual form as possible, while overhauling the old code in its entirety. Outdated applets became GIFs or were coded in contemporary languages. Slowly, the defunct links were reconnected, missing animated text and images became visible again, and the mooplay interface was once again operable. With the institutional backing of the Guggenheim, Brandon was “archived” in a way that mimicked the act of burning a CD-Rom: the original code was kept locked away, lifeless and buried visually under its new code. As internet historian Niels Brügger has theorized, the archived web is truly a “reborn web,” where, unlike other forms of art restoration, conserving the early web sometimes involves recoding it as web capabilities and software rapidly change. And while the new code itself was now entirely different from the original structure of Brandon, much effort was put into ensuring that the new interface was kept visually the same as the original website, despite running on today’s much more contemporary browsers.
Many reports of the Guggenheim’s restoration focus on the importance of archiving, of keeping a record of the original code as best as possible—even if it will never be visible again—for the sake of preservation. I invite us to think of the possibilities in this obfuscation, the enclosure of the work’s original code. In fact, while the website was unusable in 2015, writer Abbra Kotlarcyzk made an argument at the time that “despite and perhaps because of the current obstruction to Brandon’s original material presence, this project substantiates a vast and ambitious claim for a socially embodied archive.” Importantly, Cheang did not create Brandon as a stand-in for Teena’s life, but as a body whose dually digital and analog apparatuses work towards a memorial everlasting. This new mode of freedom allows us to see that the frustrations and questions of restoration itself do not hinge on how to preserve Brandon, but in the tension between Cheang’s desires towards memorialization, and the perpetual maintenance Brandon needs to stop its code from glitching beyond its borders.
I do not want to argue that the work shouldn’t have been restored, or to pose some sort of antagonism just to pose it. What I’m actually interested in is how Brandon navigates the borders of its own digi gender social body, in particular during its years of glitching, disarray, encryption, and disintegration. If we think of the body of Brandon as being governed by borders of systems, from the Guggenheim’s restoration team, to Cheang’s artistic visions, to the original code invisibilized under its new code, by maintenance, what happens when we let it live and dictate itself?
Crucially, the importance of looking at Brandon now a decade after its restoration comes from the fact that this is a question only answerable now, in the future, nearly 30 years after its inception. Even looking at the work’s contemporary container, the URL—if you click on the title “Brandon”—leads you to a landing page describing the different project collaborators, live events, and a brief explanation of its restoration Brandon, as if an archive of the project as a whole. Just as this record keeping frames the work within its time, we can use changing writing and sentiments in queer studies and the interactive internet as a way to retroactively look back on Cheang’s futuristic approach of building a digi gender social body. There is a striking parallel between Cheang’s hope in memorial to these two domains which are at their cores invested in imagining the future.
Of course, the real world boundaries that circumscribed Teena are defined by social antagonism, transphobic violence, murder. While the internet was originally a medium used to bypass the borders of time, space, and gender, to bring Brandon across the Nebraska border and into a living, digital memorial, it eventually fell fallacy to itself—to the ever changing and updating mode of the digital, to its own glitching. On one hand, there is a visibility that memorialization provides, especially for people like Teena. In the 1990s, such aspirations were heavily informed by contemporaneous U.S. political movements such as ACT UP, and enforced by a rising post-structuralist queer theory that advocated for societal acknowledgement and acceptance of queer people and culture. Yet, shortly after Brandon’s inception, academics and organizers alike began to challenge this normativity in what is often called the “antisocial turn” in queer studies. Associated with American literary critic and queer scholar Lee Edelman, particularly his 2004 book No Future, and Jack Halberstam’s early writing, antisocial theory suggests that queerness is an identity impossible to subsume into heterosexual society. By rejecting this possible harmonious future, Edelman further argued for the queer “death drive”: because same sex couples cannot reproduce, in heterosexual society queerness becomes subsumed into or likened to death.
Looking away from the digital hope of the 90s and towards the questions that antisocial and antinormative investigations raise, I am interested in viewing Brandon’s freedom through not only the project’s success in making visible Teena’s life and death, but by an acceptance of the disruption and negation associated with queer and transgender lives in cisheterosexual society as a way to imagine queer future and survival. In the case of the work, I am interested in asking what happens by allowing the digi gender social body to act on its own accord—its glitching—once the work is transported from an impossible dream to the medium of the internet. In her 2020 book Glitch Feminism, author Legacy Russell calls for a similar consideration of glitching. Russell reflects on the original promises and hopes of the internet as a way to occupy a different body via change of name, gender, race, and other bodily identities—that these “glitches” from our real bodies and identities may give us freedom of movement. Like Cheang’s digi gender social body, Russell thinks of the internet as a social body capable of lifting these borders from the individual internet surfer.
By acknowledging the borders of our physical bodies, the internet allows us to cross them. In the same way, the restrictions, the borders, of the digital body made known—disintegrating code, a slow-moving although well-meaning museum staff, the glitch—might allow us to let the digital body act for itself, not just as a container for its existence but as evidence of its aliveness. I want to ask what happens to the digi gender social body if it is allowed to glitch and escape the borders of coded capture—if its breakdown is not seen as a normative flaw, but as evidence of its continued life? Just as transgenderism has been positioned by heteronormative society as failure and anomaly, so has the glitch. Russell’s use of the glitch points us towards a more contemporary understanding of queer studies, of queer futurity. What if we not only embrace the mode of anomaly—acknowledge the opposition of queerness and transness to heterosexual society—but use it towards imagining the future, towards understanding Brandon as an agential body in its glitching? Academic José Esteban Muñoz first established our continued understanding of “queer futurity” in Cruising Utopia (2009) as a response to the antisocial turn, asking us to, instead of taking into account only present laws, realities, better response or tool towards freedom to imagine a new and radically different queer future. Perhaps this queer imagining of the future lies in an acceptance and coopting of the anomaly, of death, of the glitch.
Brandon has reflected the social landscape of understanding the history of queer lives and theory, as well as the internet. I urge us to think towards its glitching as an exercise in continued imagination and queer futurity, especially in a present world where the rights and safety of transgender people feel politically urgent—even if not always immediately possible. Cheang and her team have created a digi gender social body who, through its potential to glitch, now has freedom—not just of visibility, but a movement that allows it to defy the enclosures it was meant to be beholden to. In other words, a freedom of future aliveness.
As Muñoz writes, “the future is queerness’ domain.” It is interesting to note these two wildly different paces towards their own futures: of queer and transgender social rights within slower legal systems and social worlds, and the everchanging web. What would still ring true about Brandon as a memorial for Teena, and what would it look like another 30 years in the future if the Guggenheim stopped maintaining its code? Maybe another current programming language would discontinue support, and mooplay cease to exist again while other graphics would be spared, leaving just a few scattered, unrelated words and images, the linked text rendered invisible—a half-present digital body, yet one that self-encrypts towards another mode of freedom to run freely and rampantly.