bugs, birds, blue: Queer Ecologies of Embodiment, Kinship, and Survival

Author

• Celeste B. Newcomb, CUNY Hunter CollegeFollow

Date of Award

Spring 5-1-2026

Document Type

Thesis

Degree Name

Master of Fine Arts (MFA)

Department

Film and Media Studies

First Advisor

Zachary Nader

Second Advisor

Andrew Demirjian

Academic Program Adviser

Andrew Lund

Abstract

bugs, birds, blue is a multi-channel audiovisual installation that examines queer ecology as a framework for understanding transgender embodiment, kinship, and survival amid environmental crisis and ongoing political attacks on trans life (Mortimer-Sandilands and Erickson). Through sculpture, projection, sound, reflective surfaces, and biological imagery, the installation places human bodily matter alongside microbial and aquatic life forms to challenge narratives that frame trans existence as unnatural, recent, or isolated. Instead, the work proposes transness as relational, adaptive, and deeply entangled with broader ecological systems. The installation is composed of two interconnected environments. On one side of the space, three aquariums rest on black pedestals before monitors displaying prerecorded footage of bodily samples including dead skin and nails, blood, and hair, organized as past, present, and future states of the body. These images dissolve in and out of pixelated footage of dawn and dusk horizons. Above them, a large circular suspended screen projects looping microscopic footage of organisms sourced from Florida ponds and waterways, including paramecia, hydra, amoeba, volvox, nematodes, and other microorganisms that serve as living models of queer kinship and collective survival. Buckets of melting ice drip through incisions in the screen into the tanks below, activating contact microphones inside the aquariums that generate low bass chimes and transform the sculptural arrangement into a resonant instrument. Across the room, a large hanging sheet of mylar receives a projection of glitched sunrise and sunset footage sourced from commercial archives and processed through a collaboratively developed pixel displacement system. A poem etched into the mylar becomes visible through light and shadow while reflections shimmer throughout the studio. Drawing on queer theory, systems art, and glitch aesthetics, bugs, birds, blue uses installation as both method and argument. It invites viewers into a contemplative encounter with bodies, environments, and technologies as mutually constitutive systems, asking how queer and trans ways of knowing might reshape relationships to ecology, futurity, and one another.

Recommended Citation

Newcomb, Celeste B., "bugs, birds, blue: Queer Ecologies of Embodiment, Kinship, and Survival" (2026). CUNY Academic Works.
https://academicworks.cuny.edu/hc_sas_etds/1549