AIDS infrastructures, queer networks: Architecting the critical path

Abstract

This essay pursues how HIV/AIDS and digital media transform one another’s historiographies. Working with the archive of activist Kiyoshi Kuromiya (1943–2000), the essay considers the role of AIDS organizing in the history of the Internet, and in establishing recursive relations between media formats. Kuromiya’s early adoption of Internet technology centered the needs of people living with HIV/AIDS, incarcerated people, and people of color to access vital information for community formation and survival. Tracing the unlikely collaboration between Kuromiya and techno-futurist architect R. Buckminster Fuller (1885–1983), which culminated in Kuromiya’s founding of the Critical Path AIDS Project, this essay interrogates the term “adjuvant,” which Fuller borrowed from immunological discourse to describe their co-authorship. Anchored in a critical engagement with the metaphor of the adjuvant — an agent aiding immunological response — this essay elaborates the digital infrastructures underwriting a blueprint for community building, offering a prehistory of digital queer care networks. In conclusion, the essay meditates on the role of curation in theorizing the temporality of AIDS and its ongoing histories.

High-Touch Media

“…Recent scholarship has revisited questions about information, access, and HIV from a historical perspective, framing AIDS activist work with information and networks as critical experiments. 8 These histories build on media studies written during the North American AIDS crisis and complement recent theorizations of care and care networks developed in and through AIDS and its structures of harm and survival. 9 We bring these literatures into dialogue with media studies of deafness and deaf culture and the literature on scrapbooks as affective media in queer and trans archives.…”