Queer Filipino Selfies! Photo-sharing Project Launches November 18 on Pinterest

CA+T's new crowdsourcing project aims to create an online scrapbook of "selfies" to document the diversity of queer-identified Filipinos around the world.

The Center for Art and Thought (CA+T) is excited to announce a new cultural and educational outreach project: Queer Filipino Selfies. The photo-sharing project will begin November 18 and run until October 11, 2014, National Coming Out Day, on the social media website Pinterest (www.pinterest.com/artandthought/queer-filipino-selfies).

The dictionary defines a "selfie" as “a photograph that one has taken of oneself, typically one taken with a smartphone or webcam and uploaded to a social media website.” CA+T invites Filipino lesbians, gays, bisexuals, transgenders, queers, genderqueers, drag queens, baklas, tomboys, and other non-normative-identifying Filipinos from around the world to submit a "selfie" to pin on CA+T's Queer Filipino Selfies Pinterest board. Taking advantage of the sheer ease of taking self-portraits on digital devices, Queer Filipino Selfies aims to create a visual online scrapbook that captures the diversity of queer-identified Filipinos throughout the global diaspora and takes part in the current new media zeitgeist.

Participation in Queer Filipino Selfies is easy. Participants should submit a selfie taken with a camera, mobile phone, or any other digital image-making device by email to selfie@centerforartandthought.org; by direct message to CA+T on Twitter @artandthought (do not tweet the selfie to CA+T's wall); or include a selfie in a message to CA+T's Facebook page (www.facebook.com/centerforartandthought). Along with the selfie, CA+T asks that participants also include (1) how the participant identifies (gay, queer, genderqueer, etc.), (2) participant's location (city, state/province, country), and (3) an optional short and simple statement about the selfie, being a queer Filipino, or any other relevant information the participant wishes to share.

Queer Filipino Selfies is one of a series of projects related to CA+T's upcoming cross-platform new media exhibition Queer Sites and Sounds, which will premier in January 2014 on CA+T's website (www.centerforartandthought.org). Queer Sites and Sounds will utilize CA+T's robust web presence to stage a virtual exhibition of creative and scholarly works, a new installation of CA+T's ongoing DIALOGUES series, original commissioned art, and an Artist-in-Residence. Queer Filipino Selfies is part of CA+T's efforts to use outside social media platforms in tandem with Queer Sites and Sounds in order to extend CA+T's mission to promote cultural and educational outreach through new media technologies.

CA+T hopes that the Queer Filipino Selfies project, like the other projects in Queer Sites and Sounds, will encourage dialogue about non-normative gender and sexual identification within and beyond the Filipino diaspora and become an important virtual resource for Filipino youth, young adults, and communities negotiating with their own identities. The goal is to impart that queer Filipinos are here, are creative, and are a global community.