the interior is slippery, 2016
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collaboration Tess Altman
digital image renders of 3D body-sculptures, performance for Structure Sensor
A grown weirdo-kid coalition fights a straight genealogy of knowledge, of relation, of baby production. This techno-object is not penetrative but rather surface-concerned, a caress as opposed to an exposure. The fairy godmother’s aura is found in the relation, distance, texture, and feeling of her magic wand.
“We hope to work as two hungry caterpillars making alternative reproductions in our technological cocoons! What do the erotics of the digital-physical gesture consist of? Of a cyborg mutual masturbation: robots assisted by T + Z to create a new lineage, one not of 2-1-2-1-2, but just 00000000000000000 (a tabs-opening, command + Z + T). Perhaps the 3D scanner-wand is a dildo-toy on the playground that is also a broomstick, one that offers a certain type of escape within the bounds of the schoolyard fence, where boys and girls play along the binary and jump on it too, i.e., another monkey bar. We swing, we fly on and between this shared tech-tool. Man and woman bodies are subject to certain (different) identification/surveillance processes. What would it mean to tear up the teddy-bear cam that heteromommies put in our playrooms? What would it mean for the three of us (teddy-cam/3D scanner, Tess, Zander) to play doctor with the toy car, with the TSA scanner, with the medical vibrator of hysteria? What would a queer man-woman hysteria monster-lobotomy look like? How would the otherwise-dildo, one that is not penetrative but caressing, shaped as it is but with two sexualized bodies on it, in its data, conduct its own lobotomy? What kind of violence is it responding to and how? How can we indulge in a certain ‘queer overkill,’ an otherwise BDSM-technological-identification scenario of pleasure-pain, as we relish in a certain impotence as the site of fertility for something other than biological reproduction (as opposed to a site of shame, etc.)?”
— Tess Altman & Zander Porter
T + Z initially staged these inquiries with a screens-and-bodies installation in the Digital Design Studio of Wesleyan University’s Center for the Arts. The work has been further installed for online and offline exhibitions at Los Angeles Art Association/Gallery 825, Human Resources, The Virtual Salon, and others.
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