This video is inspired by a photography by Matt Mahurin, which first appeared as an illustration in a 1995 Time magazine story about the dangers of cyberporn. In the photograph, a naked man is wrapped around a glowing computer in a supposedly dangerous or ill-conceived tryst. Using one of my Soft Computing sculptures, I caress and embrace a glowing computer too, but with gentleness and affection.
Hello Barbie tests the limits of Mattel’s first AI Barbie that was launched as part of a growing trend of AI toys in 2015. Barbie can converse with her owner and generate tailored statements. Because she is wifi-enabled, she can stay up-to-date with what’s going on in the world. Hello Barbie records everything she hears in order to add to her repertoire. She remembers everything you tell her and can recall this information in future conversations. Unlike friends who you have to say goodbye to at the end of the day, you can take Barbie to bed with you and talk to her until you fall asleep. The potential for constant contact and lack of regular social contexts expedites trust building. In this video, her promises are tested against her realities and I point towards the ways in which she is just like any other Barbie doll, regardless of her hardware update.
Hello Barbie is installed in front of Fembots & Cyborgs wallpaper, pointing to the doll’s predecessors and cousins.
As of summer 2019, the doll is defunct.
Installation photo by Jonas Blume.
Wire Bath, a video and GIF triptych, is a fetishistic performance in which I enact my fantasy of being in a bathtub full of ethernet cords. The cords entwine my body and peek out of the water like tentacles from the ocean. As more and more of our technologies are ‘wireless’ and we continue to use the cloud as the dominant metaphor for understanding the internet, I re-connect with the physical cables used to transfer data. The tub becomes a miniature model of cyberspace and repositions the cloud underwater, where much of the physical infrastructure of the internet does in fact exist. I embed myself in this cybertub and the cables and I wash and relax together.
TechnoMakeup is a YouTube channel consisting of makeup tutorial videos for devices, apps, and websites. The series reflects on the intimate relationship we have with our technology—using it morning and night, updating its software, checking its notifications, and stroking its screen. In the tutorials, I apply moisturizer and makeup to devices like phones, tablets, and computer monitors; thus the care and maintenance that we enact on our bodies, particularly feminine bodies, is remapped onto technology. This allows for a customization and an aesthetic that is reminiscent of the early web: colorful, glittery, and user-generated.
Analog Internet is a video that reveals a pyramid of three-dimensional rendered CRT televisions, each with a different cat video appropriated from YouTube playing. Analog Internet IRL re-imagines having the same relationship to cat videos in physical, not digital, space; it is a sculptural re-imagining of the video version. Cat videos are displayed on physical screens, pyramidally towered. Analog Internet IRL was installed as part of Porn to Pizza curated by Tina Sauerlaender at DAM Gallery in Berlin.
Porn Interventions is a series of site-specific videos made for RedTube. The works invoke pornographic tropes but defy porn viewers’ expectations. The videos are uploaded to RedTube using the site’s own vernacular clickbait, with tags such as “solo girl,” “BBW,” “amateur,” etc. Instead of the free flow of sexualized bodies, porn surfers are confronted with something critical, strange, and not very sexy. The work was removed from RedTube in 2020 as part of a major purge of content.
Light Petting and Heavy Petting are a video couplet about our bodily relation to images we see on the screen. The videos suggest a different relationship to the virtual image, one that is both affective and physical. Heavy Petting, in particular, complicates the viewer’s relationship to pornographic images in multiple ways. There is an appropriation of heterosexual male-targeted porn for a female audience and rather than identify with the penis, the viewer relates with the woman’s actions. But this identification is incomplete and instead a triadic relationship is formed between the couple on screen and the viewer in meatspace.
Woven Network in Lube is a sculpture and accompanying fetish video. The sculpture consists of three clear plastic bins with ethernet and phone cords woven through holes bored into their sides. The wires are then drenched in lube, a process that the video depicts. The work is an alternate model of the Internet.
Screen Flicker re-stages the flatness of the computer screen, in direct opposition to the tunnels of cyberspace. Screens naturally flicker, at a rate too quick for our eyes to perceive but one that can be captured by a camera. This video confuses the medium of the computer screen with that of film, employing the classic avant-garde film strategy of flicker.
Analog Internet is a video-sculpture that reveals a pyramid of three-dimensional rendered CRT televisions, each with a different cat video appropriated from YouTube playing. This is the core of the Internet: an Egyptian site of worship for cats. Considering the Internet’s obsession with cats, Analog Internet re-imagines having the same relationship to cat videos in physical, not digital, space.