ABSTRACT
Chapter 3 examines the occasionally shy, sometimes uneasy yet so often wonderfully confident scenes created by Salman Toor. While travel and an awareness of a multiracial, multiethnic America appear frequently in work by Peter, Langberg, and Chase, this chapter considers how Toor explores the effects of recent technologies, such as computers and smart phones, on aesthetic forms. Concurrently, it looks at how Toor uses the aesthetics of technology to reflect on social, intellectual, and erotic practices in an active, educated, and cosmopolitan queer American culture. Using sophisticated formal strategies, Toor appraises how smartphones and computers can offer new perspectives that play with compound levels of public and private knowledge. The perspectival glow that emanates from digital screens in Toor’s work at times symbolizes a looming sense of alienation and disciplinary surveillance, but also the concurrent, albeit qualified, quotidian joys of intellectual curiosity, of texting with friends, of seeing transnational art from a distance, and of digital cruising. These ordinary activities offer a complicated joy tinged with sorrow and suffering in everyday queer practices.
