2020/09/14 by Joan Lubin, Jeanne Vaccaro · 1 citation
Social Sciences · Arts and Humanities · #European history and politics #Art, Politics, and Modernism #Historical Studies and Socio-cultural Analysis #Queer #Sociology #Temporality #Blueprint #Metaphor #The Internet #Media studies #Public relations #Computer science #World Wide Web #Gender studies #Political science #Visual arts #Epistemology #Art
paper · doi:10.5210/fm.v25i10.10403
openalex publication_date 2020/09/14 · openalex created_date 2025/10/10 · openalex updated_date 2026/06/11
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.