Dysphoria is hard to describe, and I imagine is different for everyone. For me, sometimes it’s a vile and disgusted feeling that sits somewhere between my chest and gut. Sometimes it spurs an urge to action, to fight that feeling or its causes, but often it merely drives me away, in part or in full.

Hyperpop—a queer trans musical genre—emerged in part out of dysphoria. When the sound of your own voice played back is sickening, it is natural to distort it. When neither explaining this to audio professionals nor sending off unedited audio is not viable, it is natural to do it yourself. Hence the DIY heavy distortions of hyperpop.

Dysphoria is also present in dance. Dance induces dysphoria. Dance also ameliorates dysphoria.

• What is dysphoria?
• What creates and heals dysphoria?
• What are the mechanisms of dysphoria?

Mirrors in conjunction with unrealistic female beauty standards create dysphoria. The pursuit of the impossible at someone else’s behest and without recognizing the difficulty of the task creates dysphoria. Being judged creates dysphoria? Judging oneself creates dysphoria? Confidence and acceptance heal dysphoria. “Believe in my self and question everything else” (Amy Feng, 2021) heals dysphoria. Love and trust in others and especially in self, and finding beauty in yourself as it already exists are strong wards of dysphoria.

• How can we help folks find beauty in their dance as it already exists?

We can follow in the footsteps of musicians: autotune can be realized as autorhythm: a post process to align dancers’ movements with a rhythm. Pitch shifting can be realized as speed shifting. Heavy audio distortions can be realized in any number of ways including the fractal and canvas painting methods explored in this MAP.

I feel great beauty in these methods reducing barriers to dance. And further to create stages and toys to play on and with inducing folks to dance and have fun doing so with novelty.

But there is mud in the water. As we dancers try to use digital tools to entice folks to dance and think artistically, we computer science educators try to use art to entice folks to program and think computationally. Recognizing these opposite forces may help us reimagine our own objectives to work in support of, or even collaboration with, those whom we may have hindered. I do not anticipate any of the aforementioned tools getting in the way of folks thinking computationally. Indeed they may well inspire folks to do just that in the quest of understanding these systems that happen to be computational in nature. There may be room for growth, but I see no harm here. The mud is kind.

But there is blood in the water. As Bethany Willig (2021) points out, when marginalized—in this case queer and Black—folks use heavy distortion in their music to avoid dysphoria and social repression, skirting human issues by letting the music sound nonhuman, the societal problem of dehumanizing those same marginalized groups gets reproduced. These tools of masking and hiding what causes dysphoria, both in music and in dance may help folks find beauty in themselves as they already are, but may also fall short of this and merely cut out or reshape the parts that society dislikes or that we have internalized society’s dislike of.

Is my pursuit of pure digital arts an artifact of the beauty and power of my programming, or my fear of letting a single imperfect human brushstroke of mine enter the final product? Probably both. 😐 😛