Online “blackout” protests evoke power grid failures when they temporarily shut down parts of the internet by removing content, blocking access, or replacing content with black imagery. Cait McKinney’s A Queer History of Blackouts, the Marshall McLuhan Lecture of transmediale 2025, traces the history of online blackouts to HIV/AIDS activism in the mid-1990s, showing how and why blackouts trade in feelings of frustration with broken, harmful systems and infrastructures. McKinney places the online blackout in a wider queer media theory of electrical blackouts as impasses in which affective life abruptly shifts in generative ways.

The lecture will be followed by a conversation in which McKinney and Lindsey A. Freeman will unfold how protest tactics were translated from the analogue to the digital and how marginalised communities leverage media technologies to build connections, share knowledge, and inspire collective action. They will also discuss how concepts of relationality were formulated within the digital and computing sphere and how theories of intimacy and sexuality can foster a deeper understanding of digital infrastructures.

Registration is closed.