HIGH-TECH INTIMACIES

I challenge the functional and symbolic limits of everyday technologies through intimate human-machine interactions

What happens when everyday devices are reappropriated for intimate bodily interaction? How do their inscribed ideologies react to bodily fluids and abject intervention? Since 2011, I have been reappropriating readily available medical devices, developing erotic mobile applications and exploring the intimate potential of digital and - more recently - nuclear technology.

As part of my PhD research at the University of Sussex, Sonified Freaks and Sounding Prostheses: sonic representation of bodies in performance art (2007-2012), I looked into the ways readily available medical devices are inscribed with normative ideas of the body. As part of it, I made the performance ELECTRODE (2011), which uses a medical device for the treatment of fecal incontinence to replica data of research into the male orgasm, whilst sonifying this with a cliché contemporary music data sonfication algorithm. Academic Alissa Clarke wrote an article about the work for TDR: The Drama Review.

My app Ascending Performance (2013) was conceived as both an artwork and pornography. It was advertised simultaneously in Artforum International and on Pornhub.com. By slowly stroking the smartphone screen, the user flicks through frames of a super 8 film that shows me while my penis slowly becomes erect. It was first presented at the conference Performing Porn After the Computer Became Boring, which I co-organized in London in 2013, and it was the central work of my lecture performance Thinking critical, looking sexy at Brunel University London, the review of which in Times Higher Education sparked debate around the limits of higher education teaching.

Another smart device application, FETISH (2014-16), which I made during a residency at Defribrillator Gallery in Chicago, requires the user to lick the screen in order for it to light up and thus illuminate the user's face. FETISH and Ascending Performance were exhibited at MU Eindhoven, iMAL Brussels, KONTEJNER in Zagreb and MO.CA in Brescia, among others. An interview about Ascending Performance was published in Platform Journal. I also did a lecture performance with the works at iMAL and Univerity of the Arts Berlin among others. The work was also featured in the book Performing the Penis: Phalluses in 21st Century Cultures.

As part of a commission by V2_Lab for the Unstable Media and In4Art to re-enact a work from the V2_ archive, I developed B-hind (2020) in response to Stelarc's Amplified Body performance at V2_ in the 1990s. The work involves an IoT start-up product and accompanying product launch performance. The Internet of Things device enables controlling a domestic robot with your sphincter muscle. We Make Money Not Art interviewed me about the work and it was featured in French newspaper Libération and on Vice.com, among others.

More recently, I have been exploring intimacy in relation to nuclear technology, in the context of the re-emerging enthousiasm for, and fear of, nuclear power and nuclear weapons. My film The Source and the installation connected to it, Radiate, are a softcore erotica re-enactment of a nuclear incident that took place in Georgia in the early 2000s (the film is part of my sci-fi trilogy, END TIMES).