This course explores creative strategies and operations of glitching and chimering the self, unsettling normative expression of identity and embodiment by engaging with speculative modes of self-representation shaped by creative processes, technological mediation, and posthuman imaginaries.

“Usurp the body. Become your avatar. Be the glitch.”

Legacy Russell, Glitch Feminism. A Manifesto

Mobilizing posthuman, cyber- and glitch-feminist strategies, we will reclaim glitch, “monsters”, and myth-making as feminist and queer way of imagining non-normative, chimeric, and speculative identities and rethinking avatars and digital self-bodies as sites of transformation and experimental hybrid self-figuration.

Together, we conjure glitch and chimeric mutations through hands-on experimentation with a constellation of free and open-source tools, including generative AI systems, and explore these hybrid self-bodies via extended realities (XR) environments.

“Emerging technologies can be used to capture the abstract, the confusing, the hidden, the complicated.”

Claire Hentschker

Practical exercises will move between the glitched, the grotesque, and the chimeric, to transform the self‑body into a mutable, shifting, and unruly assemblage and become otherwise, together.

To become chimeric is to resist coherence: to glitch, to graft, to mutate.

To successfully complete the lecture, participants are required to:

• Develop a working project over the course of the semester. The project should reflect on the lecture’s thematic focus and incorporate one or more of the tools introduced throughout the course.

• Present the final project, including visual documentation

• Attend and actively participate in the lecture (minimum 75% attendance required)

• The lecture will be held in English.

• The practical component is designed to accommodate a range of experience levels, from beginners to advanced. No prior knowledge is required, but existing skills are welcome.

• Participants will need access to a laptop. If this is not possible, please contact the lecturer via email to discuss alternatives.

• Active participation and engagement are essential and required to complete the semester.