'They're Made Out of Meat' is a short story by Terry Bison that encapsulates the conversation of two extraterrestrial beings. Filled with rhetorical exchanges, this story describes how human beings are seen as mere creatures of meat by these extraterrestrial creatures who seem to be a lot more technically advanced or "intelligent" as compared to human beings. Despite this advancement, these extraterrestrial beings still reckon with emotions of isolation and togetherness, proving how the advancement of technology is not mutually exclusive to the existence of isolation. Using this story as a premise along with Delhi by Vandana Singh and Nine Lives by Ursula K. Le Guin, I'm going to explore how technology can never combat the essentially gregarious nature of human beings. The need for company will always persist, and while technology can temporarily fill the void, it is afeeble resemblance of the same and eventually fizzles away.

This paper examines how queerness in broad terms can be conceived as a radical biopoliticized project – one that fosters estranging yet empowering transnational solidarities between those who are othered on the basis of identity by social, technical and affective means. I seek to investigate digital media texts and practices from both a scholarly and artistic perspectives that mobilize the inherently fluidity of queerness to cultivate an intimacy and relationality with those pushed toward the margins. My paper reflects on the holistic conditions they are creating in order begin to identify new and potentially transformative feelings to build upon. It not only recognizes the difficulty and precarity of being queer in the Asian diaspora, but also considers what it would mean to think about LGBTQ life as the starting point for imagining radically new futures for queer Asian diasporans and the broader communities and environments in which they live.

Specifically, my paper explores the ways visual records of queer experience and belongingness within the Asian diasporic communities are inscribed within the materiality, affectivity, and performativity of digital media texts and practices. Focusing on queer diasporic Chinese artist LuYang’s multimedia work titled DOKU: The Binary World (2023), I use digital ethnography and visual anthropology to inquire about how different transmedia practices of imagining and embodying queerness are mediated within virtual spaces. The networked, live motion-captured performance of DOKU: The Binary World is a real-time collaboration between motion-captured dancers – embodying the avatar forms of LuYang's genderless digital bodies – in two different geographical locations interacting in the same virtual environment. My paper wishes to illuminate how racialized queer bodies and desires with queer relations are relegated to liminal spatio-temporalities in cyberspaces. In so doing, I hope to elicit a shared future that is reciprocal and liberatory. A future that sees the power of digital media practices and makes the virtual part of the conversation around queer diasporic freedom and pleasure.

The rapid advancement of artificial intelligence (AI) has introduced new dimensions to literary creation, analysis, and interpretation. This paper examines the intersection of AI and literature, focusing on how AI-generated narratives challenge traditional storytelling methods and redefine authorship in contemporary literature. Through a comparative analysis of classical literary forms and AI-generated texts, this study explores the philosophical and ethical implications of machine-generated narratives.

By drawing on key examples from AI-authored novels, interactive fiction, and machine-assisted literary criticism, the research investigates the evolving role of human creativity in the digital age. Additionally, the paper considers the ways AI influences comparative literature studies by offering new tools for text analysis, translation, and literary interpretation. This study aims to contribute to ongoing discussions about the relationship between technology and literature, providing a critical perspective on the potential and limitations of AI in the field of comparative literature.

Keywords: Comparative Literature, Artificial Intelligence, Digital Humanities, Narrative Evolution, Computational Creativity