Heavy Processing

Fellow Ren Loren Britton invites to a book launch and talk with authors T.L. Cowan und Jas Rault: What happens when we take the joke of “lesbian processing” seriously as a research method? Heavy Processing does just this, by tracing the multi-directional genealogies and vast affinities of processing-heavy methods as innovations in information technologies (operating systems, central processing units, network designs). Part methods handbook, manifesto, and survival guide, this book opens up the fields of information studies, data studies, digital media studies, and digital humanities to critical digital methods, information technologies, and infrastructures: trans- feminist and queer (TFQ) cultural protocols and ways of working.

T.L. Cowan and Jas Rault offer heavy processing as a maximalist research method, consistent with a long and proud lesbian-leaning TFQ tradition of making a mountain out of a molehill. Heavy Processing draws together activist, artistic, and scholarly work that is both about and not about digital materials to critically reorient digital research methods calibrated for accountability, relationship-building, and trust as measures of scholarly rigor. A raging romp of a methods manual, Cowan and Rault offer an alternative to mass digitization in the form of TFQ processing for analog and born-digital materials. They write for students, faculty, and researchers, as well as for information, cultural heritage, and tech-sector professionals; for anyone interested in digital media and feminist, queer, and transcultural studies; and for anyone who has ever been studied.

If you want to read ahead, please download the open access PDF at punctum books: https://punctumbooks.com/titles/heavy-processing/. Hard copies of the book (featuring the beautiful cover art by Jess MacCormack!) will be available for sale at the event.

The event is hybrid and will be held in English. You can either attend in person at Künstler:innenhaus Büchsenhausen or follow the event online via Zoom. The Zoom link will be provided after registration via Eventbrite.

Access Info:

Online: The call will be enabled with automatic closed captions in English. People are welcome to download the open access copy of the book beforehand: https://punctumbooks.com/titles/heavy-processing/.

Onsite: Unfortunately, the space in Innsbruck is not wheelchair accessible. The bathrooms, though currently gendered are used as gender neutral. Chairs with backs, arms and floor seating is all available. We have plenty of space to store mobility devices of all kinds. There is a low sensory space available, please just ask Ren.

Bios:

T.L. Cowan (she/they) is an Associate Professor of Media Studies in the Department of Arts Culture and Media (UTSC) and the Faculty of Information at the University of Toronto, as well as a cabaret and video artist. Her creative-research practice moves between page, stage, and screen, including the work of her alter-ego, Mrs. Trixie Cane and the I Disown You Right Back campaign, as well as the GLITTERfesto: An Open Call in Trinity Formation for a Revolutionary Movement of Activist Performance Based on the Premise That Social Justice is Fabulous, which is featured in the exhibition GLITTER, at the Museum für Kunst und Gewerbe Hamburg (28 February to 12 October 2025).

T.L.’s recent essays include Abortion for Beginners in Representing Abortion, Don’t you know that digitization is not enough? Digitization is not enough! in Moving Archives, X-Reception: Re-mediating Trans- Feminist and Queer Performance Art in The Routledge Companion to Digital Humanities & Art History, Holding for Applause: On Queer Cabaret in Pandemic Times in Avidly, and Run with Whatever You Can Carry: Cross-Platform Materials and Methods in Performance Studies–Meets–Digital Humanities in American Quarterly. She is currently completing two monographs: Transmedial Drag & Other Cross-Platform Cabaret Methods and The Needs of Others: On Media, Trauma & Disorder. 

Jas Rault (they/them) is an Associate Professor of Media Studies in the Department of Arts, Culture, Media (UTSC) and the Faculty of Information at the University of Toronto. Jas’s research focuses on trans- feminist and queer digital praxes and protocols; media histories of settler coloniality, white supremacy and sexuality; aesthetics and affects of social movements.

Recent publications include Window Walls and Other Tricks of Transparency: Digital, Colonial and Architectural Modernity in American Quarterly; White Noise, White Affects: Filtering the Sameness of Queer Suffering in Feminist Media Studies; Ridiculizing Power: Relajo and the Affects of Queer Activism in Mexico in Scholar & Feminist Online. Rault’s first book is Eileen Gray and the Design of Sapphic Modernity: Staying In (Ashgate/Routledge) and they’re currently working on a book, provisionally entitled Open Secrets: Technologies of Whiteness in Decline.