MARILYN ROXIE - ABOUT

Drawing by Travis Egedy

Hi, I’m Marilyn Roxie. I’m the founder of Creative Commons netlabel Vulpiano Records and video artist collective VIDEO HOOK-UPS. I work for Rate Your Music / Sonemic as Community and Social Media Manager.

I am a graduate of Manchester Metropolitan University with an MA in filmmaking and have a BA in Studio Art from San Francisco State University, focusing on digital media and emerging technologies and minoring in sexuality studies. In my art, I often like to explore androgyny and interrogate maleness and submission, often with the aid of what is available for adaptation in the public domain and Creative Commons sphere.

In my free time, I love to make bots, playlists, read, and play video games.

Art

My studies and personal projects involve a mixture of analog and digital techniques, including 35mm photography, digital photography, video art, and collage. Androgynous models, dolls, toys, and harmony between the virtual / natural worlds are recurring images in my work.

In 2018, I began to work with Twine and Twitter bots, releasing some divinatory projects (The Public Tarot and Songs of Near and Far Away) and meditations on pretty boys and the occult (10,000 Imaginary Boys).

You can find my full exhibition history here.

Music

My own musical interests initially developed through a childhood love of Kraftwerk’s Computer World, playing the keyboard, and learning to play the video game soundtrack tunes of Koji Kondo and Nobuo Uematsu by ear. Through my teen years, I used a variety of guides to shape my interests and help in my quest to find music. The Rate Your Music community and 1001 Albums You Must Hear Before You Die proved particularly influential. Icontributed to the Rate Your Music Ultimate Box Set project, making definitive genre playlists for post-Punk, coldwave, vaporwave, and mod. I am now Community and Social Media Manager at Rate Your Music and regularly curate playlists and highlight user content for the site.

I’ve been running the Creative Commons-based netlabel Vulpiano Records since November 2009. Artists from around the world have released works through Vulpiano, including Natural Snow Buildings, Derek Piotr, Calvin Markus, Neurotic Wreck, and Aseptic Void. All releases are hosted on Internet Archive, with select albums also available on Free Music Archive and Bandcamp. In November 2019, Vulpiano Records had its first limited edition physical release with Vulpiano Records 10-Year Anniversary on cassette.

I started the music blog A Future in Noise in 2008 as a place to store my thoughts on music and promote artists that I liked — particularly independent and unsigned artists — along with other team members. I released my own synth compositions beginning in 2008 through 2009, using a KORG Triton and Propellerhead Reason. I would recommend my 2009 album New Limerent Object as a starting point.

Gender and Sexuality

In early adulthood, a number of factors collided to bring me closer to self-awareness: moving to San Francisco, my adoration of cross-dressing rock star Nicky Wire, a friend’s recommendation of Poppy Z. Brite’s writing, Kate Bornstein’s My Gender Workbook, Carol Queen and Lawrence Schmiel’s PoMoSexuals, and learning about a panoply of identities through connecting with others like me. I started my site Genderqueer and Non-Binary Identities in September 2010 as a place to host a design for the genderqueer flag I created and to share information about genderqueerness, covering definitions, a history of the term and associated communities, academic research, health information, and compilations of external genderqueer resources such as books and articles.

I was photographed by Chloe Aftel for GenderQueer (2014), which has been featured in San Francisco Magazine, Huffington Post, and Slate.

I worked as Social Media Coordinator at Good Vibrations from fall 2015 through winter 2016, after starting out as a Sex Educator / Sales Associate. I managed all Good Vibes social media profiles directly, created blog posts about top products and company news, including helping to promote Carol Queen and Shar Rednour’s book The Sex & Pleasure Book: Good Vibrations Guide to Great Sex for Everyone.

I interned with the Center for Sex & Culture in varying capacities beginning in summer 2011, culminating with my role as Media Director in 2014. I discovered the Center through familiarity with Carol Queen‘s writing and her work as Staff Sexologist at Good Vibrations. I had interviewed Queen at the Center in March 2011. You can read more about my experience there in a post at the CSC Tumblr. Serving as a combination of library tech, social media manager, and webmaster, I helped get the Center for Sex and Culture’s thousands of books indexed on Goodreads and fundraised $2000 for CSC’s Grace Alley Mural project through social media.