"New Media, Sex, and Culture in the 21st Century"

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October 2 - 31, 2010 at the Museum of New Art, Detroit
Curated by Steve Coy and Jonathan Lillie

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As part of the city's Gallery Week events held the first week in October, 2010, this show featured the work of over 50 international, national, and regional artists who explore femininity, masculinity, desire, pleasure, family politics, liberation and repression, pornography, prostitution, sexual violence, and other topics. The show's theme recognizes that our digital media culture is saturated with sexual representations and complex issues of sexuality (read a full abstract on the show's theme here). The work displayed in this exhibition probe, comment on and question these issues in many media including video, performance, photography, painting, sculpture, interactive computer games, and printmaking. The opening on Saturday, October 2 from 6 to 9 p.m. featured a performance by John O'Donnell.

The show was launched in collaboration a special issue of NmediaC, the online academic Journal of New Media and Culture, featuring articles that also address the topic, "New Media, Sex, and Culture in the 21st Century."

Ana Graces Kiley

Ana Garces Kiley

Lullabies Never Lie

My work transforms the human body into a magical realist vessel for embodying archetypes of death, desire and our collective unconscious, those very things that make us most human and most enigmatic.  In response to a predominantly male depiction of sexuality throughout art history, as a woman I want to depict sexuality and sensuality from a feminine perspective.  Rejecting the traditional patriarchy of the canvas, I employ voile to unveil the complexity of our eph–emeral nature. My work has come off the wall to sit in the center of the room and is anchored to the ceiling with monofilament. I have stretched both sides with the voile as well as added an acrylic insert to create multiple layers including the viewers themselves which are visible as one stands on one side and looks through the piece.

Brian Seldt  (USA)

  • Death and the Maiden- wood block print - 4 x 6

My work speaks of sex in the realm of fantasy combined with the attitudes currently accepted in society. In the comics genre, women are portrayed as big breasted and are objectified. The appeal is to the male libido and is meant to generate fantasies and boost sales. My piece “Double Dipped Perfect Pink” takes two female comic book heroes and places them in a lusty lesbian scene that mirrors this urge. In the pieces “Death and the Maiden”, Stuffing”, and “Lord, Your Children Are Having Sex With Spiders,” I address the rampant promiscuity that is becoming socially acceptable behavior.

Double Dipped Perfect Pink - 2005 - wood block print - 8 x 10"

Spiders

Lord, Your Children Are Having Sex With Spiders! - 2003 - wood block print - 11 x 14"

 

Stuffing

Stuffing - 2009 - wood block print - 4" x 6"

 

 

Holvoet7

Camille Holvoet, Studio Artist

Camille Holvoet was born in 1952 in San Francisco. She has been creating artwork at Creativity Explored since 2001. Holvoet’s preferred medium is oil pastel. Her pastels are rich blends of line and color, created with many overlapping layers. Her attention to spatial detail is evident in all of her art. Whether she is working on a small-scale drawing or a large-scale painting on canvas, the compositions are always well balanced and meticulously planned. The straightforward interior scenes are an especially interesting glimpse into Holvoet’s memory of her former years spent in an institution. Since she started at Creativity Explored, we have witnessed Holvoet working on a larger scale, experimenting with computer drawing media, and integrating text into her pieces. She enjoys using a Wacom tablet to create digital drawings that combine text and imagery. Her texts are often powerful and personal, drawing on memory and its anxieties; when juxtaposed with her beautiful renderings of desserts, the pieces take on new levels of meaning and resonance. Repeating elements in her work include cakes, cookies, fire, cross-eyed humans, Ferris wheels, and nudity. Each of these represent her emotions dealing with weight, aging, feeling marginalized and most prominently- her sexuality. For instance, her oft-used ‘cupcake’ icon serves as a metaphor for her own breasts.  To quote the artist, each cupcake looks as if “it is an upside-down titty with a cherry on top”. If you look closely, each of her cupcakes is adorned with a perfectly pink cherry.  Food has become a place of solace, if not obsession for Holvoet. Obsession translates to intense and deliberate art making. In viewing Holvoet’s work, her broad emotional capacity is evident, and often leaves the viewer in one of two states: hungry or horny

Danielle DeWitt London, England)

Fritzl - 2009-2010 - graphic illustration

This is based on Josef Fritzl , the Austrian child abuser who kidnapped and molested his daughter. His head is attached to a cow's body, and he is gagged and bound as a horse. The work is a transformation from sexual predator to victim and addresses the popular opinion of hatred for this man after he was caught and imprisoned and how he has in a sense become his own victim.

2004

David Brody (Seattle, WA, USA)

Untitled - 2004 - Oil on wood panel 8 x 6"

My work has long involved sexually explicit imagery. During 2003 and 2004 I produced a group of about 15 works painted directly from porn sites. I would set-up in front of the monitor and paint as prior generations may have done with a model.  One of the things I found was that a lot of the web images were not constructed particularly well in terms of color or value relationships – so I improved on what I found – America deserves visually astute porn. A century ago, Matisse drew from the model in the morning and then painted in the afternoon. The drawings were done observationally, the paintings were studio constructions done from the imagination. But the latter were influenced by the morning's observation. My small porn studies functioned similarly in my own practice - allowing the source material to permeate the greater studio project.

Fernandes4

Hugo Fernandes

My portraits of strange men from sex web sites are about a sense of non-acceptance in the gay community.  Although each individual I photograph experiences their own unique struggles, they are all united in their oppression as homosexual men. For a transient time each subject is my muse, after which they disappear back into the abyss they evolved from. Despite the loneliness that gay men endure, we are often quick to abandon others due to our fears: our fears of abandonment and our fears of shame. These fears often restrict us from relationships with others.  It comes as no surprise that gay men are often confused and unhappy individuals. The world fails to grant us equality. I want these photographs to express the emotions behind these simple, yet complicated encounters.  I am interested in the beauty of each man’s body language and emotions within the landscape of their own space, in the presence of a foreign subject, which though still unusual, ceases to be uncomfortable in the world of online encounters. The images of these men are as much portraits of them as they are self-portraits. 

FernandesIn photographing someone, there exists a bond between photographer and subject. Although my subjects allow me a level of both physical and emotional proximity to themselves and their homes, they present me with what they are willing to have me see, be it their home’s décor, their vanity, or both.  They present me with the illusory life they have concocted in anticipation of my photographing them. They reveal themselves as they are wanting to be seen, their homes as they’ve prepared, their bodies as they’ve groomed them and their lives as the facade they’ve created either for myself, themselves, or both.  Illusory appearances are something of a gay tragedy.  So many gay men spend their limited money to liken themselves to appearances of wealth, whilst impoverished; it’s a meager attempt at raising their confidence and being respected.With every subject I encounter, I am further empowered to describe this community of sexual outlaws, to strip them of the physical properties that are typical of a sexual moment and to then capture them in a moment that is both foreign and familiar. The images are often dark and melancholic, yet romantic and personal.

klai2

Kris Wlodarski (London, England)

Klai2 - 2010 and Sister Small - 2010 (below) - oils and acrylic on canvas

I'm exploring the discourse of notions of excess (transgressive behaviour) and culture, and how it is manifested. In my work I make reference to philosophers like Georges Bataille (transgression, and his obsession with moments of 'madness' when the prison of reason is suspended) and Foucault (models of power, especially medical gaze, disassociation of body from person). I explore themes of sex and violence, their presence in contemporary visual culture, and how are they being justified or unjustified.

 

Souter1

Michelle Souter (London, England)

She's a big liar - 2009 - mono-print drawing on paper16.5 x 23.4"

Michelle Souter’s work is founded in life drawing; deforming and mutilating the traditional female figure with animalistic components, the repetition of genitalia and genital symbols and the inclusion of seemingly random text; lyrics from songs, personal memories or quotes taken out of context. To create her mono-prints Michelle Souter must draw in mirror image on the back of paper, which is pressed against an inked up board. In addition to drawing in reverse Souter uses her non-writing hand to draw her mono-prints. The results imbue Souter’s work with a childlike aesthetic, suggesting a link to psychoanalytical practice, free association and sexual ambiguity.

pic03

Nicola Bockelmann (UK)

PORN CHIC III - 2005 - acrylic and oil on canvas - 100 x 160 cm.

My art currently deals with the phenomenon of Porn Chic which is omnipresent in our society. Porn Chic evolved in the 90s when the media contributed to the sexualisation of culture. As a result the boundaries between pornography and culture became blurred and permeable and elements of pornography trickled into the mainstream. Because of its popularity, extension and impact, creating awareness of its existence is, in my opinion, of utmost importance. I aim to create awareness by blowing up Porn Chicimages from advertisements and painting them in a semi-photorealistic way on large size canvases whilst maintaining the figure's sense of distance and glam aethetics. Subtly created dissonances, such as an elongated limb or a slightly lopsided eye, exaggerate the characters' expressions and stereotypical personalities. This provokes thought processes and urges the viewer to question this everyday glossy explicitness.

forPme

Prince Vaughese Thomas

For PME - 2006 - digital photograph, chromogenic print - 45 X 45 each section

Fashion Accessories metaphorically conveys my interest in the intersection of popular culture, science, and commerce. In recent years, there have been several new drugs that have been released to the public which allow for various personal enhancements.  I have chosen these "designer drugs" as a departure point to create a body of work that metaphorically questions the use of pharmaceutical science and technology in our everyday lives.  With the assistance of these drugs are we removing the experiential part of living from the individual; or is it just another accessory:  a brush, a belt, a razor, and a pill.

Slumberparty

Richard Joel Bannister (UK)

Slumber Party - 2010 - oil and acrylic on paper - 84 x 59 cm

My practice is now in the process of exploring and investigating how the male can be represented, constructed and codified within contemporary society and culture, in relation to my fascination with images that evoke themes of power, desire and exploitation. I intend to examine, criticise and reflect upon the gaze, current belief systems, gender issues, politics, sexuality and identity to encourage and strengthen my approach, in order to confront existing expectations of male representation and definition. I believe that this will provide a valid framework and vocabulary to give constructive insight and intellect on the subjects of masculinity and male sexuality within current Western society and painting.

By referencing and expanding upon concepts derived from my personal experiences and cultures (such as working as a model in gay pornography & taking part in S&M activities as a means of direct artistic research), it is my goal to question and challenge stereotypes, push barriers and explore taboos in order to gain further understanding and meaning of how the male can be visually identified, interpreted and conceptually portrayed within the twenty-first century.

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Aaron Oldenburg (Baltimore, MD, USA)

Suction - 2009 - computer game

My primary interest is in game rules as an expressive medium. Suction is a simulation of the verb "to suck". It is a short, one-level game created in about a day. It is part of a series of experimental games where I take verbs that have not been well-represented in games and simulate them.>

Alan Bigelow (UK)

Love Is - 2008 - web-based Flash multimedia with database

"Love Is..." moves toward a definition of love in three stages: first through a standard, accepted lexicon; then via a series of individual expressions of love; and finally as defined within randomly selected statements about love provided by visitors to the site.

Michael Filimowicz, Andres Wanner, Melanie Cassidy (California, USA)

Cursor Caressor Eraser - 2010 - Flash based interactive multimedia

Cursor Caressor Eraser is an interactive installation and net artwork contemplating the erotic image and themes of sensuality in time. Caressing gestures of the interactors produce erasures of digital photographic imagery, resulting in visual palimpsests. These erasures thematize temporal dialectics of touch and bodily encounters with others, such as forgetting and remembering, or recognition and strangeness. A simple gesture- a stroke across a touchpad or the movement of a mouse – creates a series of rich variations of bodies in change.

Stephane Shibatsuji-Perrin (Japan)


Porn Hero - 2010 - Diildo and video game running on a Mac

In video games you can play sports, music, play a character of a different universe, of a different gender, kill people, be a god, pilot a plane, manage cities or countries, and so forth. Porn Hero takes a provocative stance through the "detournement" of the use of the Wii Remote, the video game console Wii being arguably the most family-oriented console. Porn Hero is a parody of the famous Guitar Hero video game series. The game is a simulation of a porn actor performing his job. The game player can become a porn star for a moment, and can advance if "talented" enough. The player uses a specially designed controller called the "Diildo" that is to be used in combination with a Wii Remote. The game duplicates the orientation and back-and-forth movements of the penis of a porn actor with the Diildo. The Dildo can be hand-manipulated or attached to the body at the actual location of the sexual organs of the player.

Francis Farmer

Barely Legal - 2010 - color print on cotton paper - approx. 1cm x 1 cm each

These pieces belong to an ongoing body of work that addresses, through an experimental technology-informed process, questions that concern ownership, sexuality within visual pornography and revealed hidden states of desire. The source images for the work are taken from the magazine Barely Legal, which is published by Groupe MVP (Canada). The images have been scanned in to a computer and, after manipulation in software, returned the world as altered 'hard copy', with the original magazine subsequently 'shredded' to make die-cut confetti.

Peter Madzelan (Nebraska, USA)

Unidentifiable feeling -90" wide x 102" high x 66" deep

"Unidentifiable feeling" is a mixed medium piece. Painting, photography and structural elements combine to form this installation.  The photography faced monitors depict internet web cam interactions with the jeans representing the sexuality of such encounters.  The painting in the background represents the love that developed through mutual compassion, understanding and finding someone that makes you feel not alone anymore. This piece represents how the internet can foster sexual maturity as well how the landscape of dating has evolved. A confused teen can learn  what his feelings mean as well as find refuge in the company of other like minded individuals. Relationships also can be establish without boundaries. Where once prospects were limited to a neighboring town, the internet has made it possible for anyone anywhere to connect. 

Toban Nichols (Los Angeles, CA)

The Oppobrium book project - 2009 - installation: book and stand

The Oppobrium book project is an appropriation, deconstruction and reformat of Vogue’s Book of Etiquette and Good Manner,1969. The original text was physically taken apart and each page was scanned utilizing several large format scanning machines at one time. Directly from the scanner bank it was compiled into a single computer  file to create an exact copy of the original text. The writing was then mechanically read by a computer program that details and translates the scanned text in a process called Optical Character Recognition or OCR. Next, an engineer designed a computer algorithm that would read the contextuality of the document and categorically replace every fourth word in the entire 750 pages with one specific word, in this case the word, Pussy. 

After the replacement word was chosen and digitally impregnated into the text, it was reprinted and re-bound.  The idea was to pair the original, antique book along side the “new” “updated” version. It would be bound using color and style as close to the original as possible with small changes only hinting at what is to come when picked up and read. The replacement word was chosen after a poll was taken of consumers, artists, and people on the street. A list was then compiled of the words that first came to mind by respondents when the original book and it’s ideas and contents were discussed with them. The word chosen was felt to best explain and provoke the overall idea this relic of a different age spawned in the self-percieved “modernity” of our culture.

Upon reading through the original book, Vogue’s Book of Etiquette and Good Manners from 1969, the reader is at once aware of how humorous and ironic it seemed by today’s standards. The book not only seems to contain out-moded ideas of propriety, but also takes itself very seriously thus enhancing the complicated “joke” it reads like in our modern culture.  An idea was formed to exacerbate that joke, to make it more of a one-liner, streamline it’s humor and create a political statement at the same time.

Alex Hetherington (Edinburgh, Scotland)

Cigar - 2008 to 2010 - video

Cigar is made up of found footage of men smoking cigars. This footage is taken from principally gay fetish sites, though some has been ripped from YouTube and some sequences from gay porn. The video is constantly remade as more sequences are added or edited out.

I am interested in the performance aspects of smoking to camera in private scenarios for public consumption; while aspects of fetish and masculinity continue to be played out through their repetitive  performative actions. The work forms a playlist as part of artist and curator Lyndsay Mann's online video channel, The Agent Ria, and from there links back to its source material along with similar scenes of men smoking cigars, whereby its presence as an art video is lost in a broader playlist of fetishistic activities. The work continues the artists interest in postproduction and queer theories, which have included the recent projects Neon John, a new queerzine and Triangle of Need, a remake of Catherine Sullivan's video installation using written texts and reviews as the basis of a new dramatic treatment of the work.

Anna Campbell (Allendale, Michigan)

Beefcake - 2008 - video

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"Beefcake" compiles footage of bodybuilders in a cacophony of applause and flesh.  Contrary to dominant modes of mass media representation, this constantly shifting cut-up focuses on the male rather than the female figure, creating a spectacle in which the subjects become both terrifying in their excess and desirable in their hyper-masculinity.

 

Bunny Head - 2006 - video

"Bunny Head" is an irreverent experiment in editing that creates a fantastical scenario in which objects of desire and modes of self-gratification become blurred.

Boris Eldagsen (Germany)

SPAM the musical - 2008 - video

Based on the texts of email-spam, 'SPAM the musical' is spam turned video art. Using the tools of web 2.0 and viral marketing 'SPAM the musical' combines the strength of social media with video art, attitude with anarchy, and casting with exploitation.

Dawn Wooley

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Interloper  - 2008 -  video - soundtrack by Leroy Carr, Six Cold Feet

My artistic practice encompasses photography, video and installation. In my artwork I create photographic cut-outs and re-photograph them in the real world. I intend to make it difficult to distinguish the 2-dimensional photograph from the surrounding scene. My work is increasingly concerned with the experience of the viewer and I attempt to define a direct relationship between the cut-out and the person looking at it. In the first instance of looking I hope to create a state of familiar acceptance of what the viewer is seeing, followed by an uncanny moment when the oddity of the image is registered, and finally a state where the implied reading collapses, the cut-out becomes visible to the viewer and the image is read in new terms. My artwork forms an enquiry into the act of looking and being looked at. Referring to psychoanalysis, phenomenology and feminism I examine my own experience of becoming an object of sight and also consider the experience the viewer has when looking at me as a female, and a photographic object. Voyeurism and exhibitionism intertwine in these purposefully provocative scenes.
In Interloper I have continued to play on this illusion of reality, using digital video to create an everyday domestic scene in which my cut-out becomes a substitute for me. The overtly sexual nature of the body compels the viewer into the position of voyeur, only to reveal itself as an inanimate object. In this short piece I aim to prolong the suspension of disbelief so the disjuncture between the presence and absence of the body is more pronounced.

 

Freya Bjorg Olafson (Canada)


CVS (Computer Vision Syndrome) and A/S/L (below) - 2008 - video

The AVATAR series explores methods of creating, validating and disseminating one’s identity through the use of technology and the Internet. The work is inspired by the mantra “I post therefore I am”, whereby Internet users legitimize their existence by documenting their lives and uploading this media to personal webpages and blogs. Through AVATAR I am facilitating an inquiry into our desire to share and publicize our lives. This series in progress has manifested in 11″x14″ paintings / drawings, a performance, installation, videos and a collaboration with new media artist Pierre Andrieux. In Fall 2009 Winnipeg was host to the premiere of a solo performance as part of the AVATAR series investigating the themes of virtuality, identity and technology. To date excerpts of this developing body of work have been performed at InterAccess Electronic Media Arts Center (Toronto), Studio 303 (Montreal), PAF ~ Performing Arts Forum (France) and Kling&Bang Galleri (Iceland).

 

Michelle Jones-Lillie and Jonathan Lillie (Maryland, USA)

The Boob Tube - 2010 - mixed media - 29 x 29 x 16

“The Boob Tube” is a study of American society's uses and gratifications of the female breast over the last 50 years. It juxtaposes the breasts of several volunteers, temporarily removing them from their social and bodily contexts by being cast in glass, with media representations of breasts from the classic era of the American broadcast television projected through a circa 1974 RCA TV. This particular television was manufactured by one of the artists´ parents the year she was born. She was not breast fed, since this activity was somewhat taboo at the time. Today she is a mother, breastfeeding her second child, but is perplexed over our society's continued overdetermined reactions -- disgust, shame, worship, desire -- with the female breast.

The Boob TubeWhy a television from 1974? We chose this object to represent an obsolete information and communication technology that still physically works, but will not broadcast stations because of supposed technological advances, most specifically the federal mandate that all stations cease analogue broadcast in favor of the digital format. Recent advances in audiovisual media enabled us to connect an edited video feed to this old TV. However, the piece speaks most directly to the question of society´s uses and gratifications of the female body. These attitudes, laws and behaviors have changed in some ways. But how much? The female breast is one of the most fundamental and amazing inventions of mammal evolution -- or of God -- but it is also perhaps the most highly commodified and politically charged human body part in contemporary society.

Gareth Hudson (UK)

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An Ode to Hel... - 2008 - video

A tribute to metropolis, sex and the language of the body in relation to digital media. A live performance filmed with wireless security cameras and edited offline.

Henry Gwiazda

In bed with light - 2008 - video

My work is about the choreography of reality. It's about the way everything moves and is interconnected to create beauty. Each small, choreographed scene can be appreciated for itself, but on subsequent viewings, takes on a separate meaning. They become metaphors for our lives, our dreams and ourselves.

Hillerbrand+Magasamen (Texas, USA)

Lick - 2010 - video

Lick examines issue of sex and technology and the Internet.  The video consists of 3 elements: a video image of a male mouth licking a female hand, generic sound effects of creatures screaming taken from internet web sites that advertise “Free Sound Effects” and the identifying title of the sound effect which is being heard.  The remixing and paring of these normally mundane elements transform them into something else.  They begin to question our own observations of what is funny, sexual and safe in our culture of click and download relationships.

Ian Haig (Australia)

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Super Human Factory - 2000 - Video

A video based on various Japanese sex museums built in the 1960’s, the video depicts the various displays of artificial insemination, mutant breeding pods, alien sperm harvesting, and other assorted sci fi scenarios around sex, the body and technology.
With a distinctly 1960’s ‘Space – sex odyssey 2001’ style, the video depicts a futuristic world with a bizzaro narrative of space bimbos inseminated with alien sperm and all manner of sexual – technological laboratory equipment.
The video shows a strange and unsettling future particularly in reference to IVF programs, ’test tube babies’ and technologically assisted conception.

James Woodward (New York City, USA)

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Atrophic Astrology: Crush Video #1 (Scorpio) - 2010 - Video

My video "Atrophic Astrology: Crush Video #1 (Scorpio)" utilizes overt sexual expression to meditate on recurrent themes within my practice: feelings of otherness and solitude, gender identity and construction, and the mirrored, performing self.  The video incorporates both found and original footage including imagery from a Panamanian beach, my Brooklyn studio, and YouTube.  Rooted in the autobiographical, the video is infused with an intensely personal and sexualized overtone and functions as a humorous critique of jock culture and society’s constructed ideology of male sexuality.  Using not only the personal but the familiar, the video incorporates sound from Chariots of Fire(1981), toying with such social codes as nationality, identity and sport.

Using this idea of the familiar or the recognizable, the dialogue in the video is based on an astrological, sexual compatibility forecast and list of fetishes between myself (a Libra) and a real-life crush (a Scorpio).  Derived from a personal infatuation, the phrasing and language shift between a categorical statement about an anonymous and non-existent relationship and intimate recitals of fetishes and sex.  The words and phrases are meaningless, conjured by a falsity but through an agency people often elect to interact with and utilize for individual definition.  The video investigates a shifting space between personal and private, the hyper individual vs. group.  Moreover, it questions the mechanisms we instigate to define ourselves and how, why and where we seek the singular and the unique within these constructs.

Julia Barbosa Landois (New Mexico, USA)

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Indelible - 2009 - Video

Indelible was inspired by an interview about a legendary sex show in Nuevo Laredo, Mexico.  The video is part of a developing performance/installation piece, entitled The Boystown Project (Culito de Oro), that examines sex tourism and masculine rites of passage on the Texas/Mexico border.

Ondrej Brody, Kristofer Paetau, Michal Pechoucek (The Czech Republic)

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Auticko - 2006 - Video

We can access the video of O. Brody & K. Paetau by stepping into an area of profound loss escalated by an unpleasant physical confrontation. The artists are operating at the border of ethical limits which most of us do not dispute but rather fear and ignore. Our natural fear of losing control and the integrity of our conceptions are challenged by the ‘evil forces’ operating within the structure of the video called “Auticko”. Auticko means‚ ‘small toy car’ in Czech. It might also evocate the term ‘autism’ and produce other associations in the viewers’ mind. “Auticko” was produced for a particular occasion - it was filmed and showed in the Jiri Svestka Gallery in Prague. The act of violence, aggression, manipulation and (remote-) control is omnipresent in the work and it is only up to the viewer to decide if this is happening rightfully. Auticko is on the first sight a cruel, cynical and sexually explicit work. Brody’s & Paetau’s raw, almost anti-artistic approach seems over-structured, overexposed and leaves us at its original anti-aesthetical stage with everything in our face that most of us are trying to hide.

 

Laura Lynn Hsieh - (Pontiac, MI, USA)

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Married Life, Kids, Boredom, and a Guy with a Hammer” - 2010 - Video

What’s your biggest sexual fantasy?” That is the one question in the last year that has allowed me to think of myself as more than just a Mom or a wife. Since my husband of eight years asked me this, I have redefined what I believe our existence could be as suburban parents, redefined what I am as a woman and a mother who has needs outside of her responsibilities to her family.

What does it mean to be a mother? An artist? A wife? I was finishing graduate school when I got pregnant. I had two large installations, plans for residencies, and three boyfriends. After several years of marriage and as recently as a year ago, I had stopped referring to myself as an artist and had not felt I was the sexual being that I had been. My existence could be defined by simple routines as a wife, a mother of two, a retail manager, a woman lost in the everyday tasks. I felt no connection to any artists or social communities with which I had identified or associated previously. The project,

“Married Life, Kids, Boredom, and a Guy with a Hammer” is a portrait and celebration of one woman in her family and in her return to creating and defining self. The video is purposefully shot in an in-camera edited style of early home video.

Linda Ford (San Francisco, CA, USA)

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Self-Discipline - 2010 - Video

In the Self-Discipline series, I employ drawing and self-portraiture to explore the intersection of artistic and sexual fantasy, the release of private fantasies into the public artworld, and how fantasy feeds creativity.  I’m interested in how the metaphors of fantasy and self-discipline mirror the imaginative dynamics of the artistic process and how they play out in the “normative” sexual body, the “deviant” behavior of S/M, and in the moral or intellectual arenas. Moreover, I am interested in circuitousness of self-portraiture and transgressing the spatial boundaries between model, artist, and viewer.

 

 

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Olympia: Sex Worker - 2007 - Video

The abject and excessive are integral elements in my work and are closely intertwined with cultural doctrines of normalcy, deviancy, and the self regulation of desire. In addition, Baudelaire's definition of prostitution as making private fantasies or artistic creations public has been deeply influenced my art practice.  I am interested in self-representation as a strategy; my work that has been informed by my “paid” employment at a local peepshow and as a video editor for a gay-bondage-pornography company.

My video works focus on my previous peepshow employment and address issues of institutional order and control, voyeurism, and commerce.In Olympia:  Sex Worker,I reenacted Manet’s Olympia projected the video onto the box office at SFMoMa to address issues of the nude vs. the naked and the institutional art hierarchy.

Marianna and Daniel O'Reilly (London, UK)

Royal Male or Coppola’s Spyglass - 2009 - Video

‘Royal Male or Coppola’s Spyglass’ is an experimental narrative about a woman in search of her image, her body and her expression. As she encounters the male in the language that pins down her gender, her image begins to decay into archaic stereotypes of the feminine that are rooted in fear and horror, and the language she is subjected to becomes one of violence. In an attempt to experiment with the possibility of a feminine language the video emphasises the value of the interruption; in sex, in language and in image, and introduces ETA Hoffmann’s character of the Sandman as the deliverer of dreams to the sleeping, and of nightmares to the awakened.

 

Megan Jean Harlow (Vermont, USA)

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Dancing Goddess of YouTube - 2010 - Video

Anonymous is the dancing chaotic God of YouTube. Their playfulness, fractured ideologies, and rhetorical strategies embrace the irony of postmodernism. Identity becomes formless within the medium of the internet. As content is separated from form what emerges is a space of chora. Plato described chora as the space between being and becoming.

Contrary to critics fears of postmodernisms emptying of ethics I argue
that a new ethics emerges in the chaos of chora. This is an ethics of the moment . Anonymous seen in this light is not the end of ethics but rather a return to a primordial ethics that speaks of truths excess; addressing the paradox of contemporary micro-celebrity culture. Anon's communiqués poetically undermine narcissism. Following Butlers account of ethics I want to argue that ethical action requires a freedom from the subject. In the face of an unstable society the drive to self publish to give an account of oneself is the risk necessary to act.

What if Anon was a woman? If Anon is read as a woman we can begin to uncover the logic that has created identity and woman. Western metaphysical tradition has placed women in a binary focused on the male gaze - beauty/monster - Feminine subjectivity has been dictated by the privileging of the male gaze as Berger argues. Anon reflects the shattered image of celebrity back upon itself. Anon is not the death of the subject but the return of repression a ghost in the wires.

Melissa Potter (Chicago, USA)

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Boy Brides & Bachelors - 2009 - Video

Boy Brides & Bachelors< is an animated video shot on a cold January night in Southeastern Serbia during a ritual called Surovari in which men dress as women (large breasted peasants, grandmothers, and brides), and engage in pretend sexual acts with village bachelors.Little is known about the meaning of this pagan ritual, but its contemporary gender role-play implications are profound.

As I ran from house-to-house shooting footage that night, I didn’t know until more than halfway through the event that the “girl” with enormous breasts (who transfixed me with her beauty and outrageousness) was actually a boy, Milos. I also discovered that a little boy who was following the group, but rather uninvited, was in fact a girl. No girls are allowed to participate. That my ethnographer colleagues with whom I was traveling didn’t mention this seemingly key factor was baffling. The former Yugoslavia adheres by our Western standards to traditional gender roles and codes, and thus alternative variations of sexual expression are often met with fear, and even violence.

In Boy Brides & Bachelors, I use stop motion animations to engage my questions about the underlying meanings of the ritual, and make a connection between my inability to translate much of what was going on with the strange language of gender itself. Ultimately, I pose the question: What would our world look like if women had their opportunity to parody gender?How might we transform our society if this kind of role-play were allowed out from under the shadow of night and ritual? >This piece is part of an ongoing dialog in my work about the organization of society through gender codes, rituals, and discrimination.  

Nia Burks (Maryland, USA)

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Reaction#1 - 2010 - Video 1:39

As a digitally knowledgeable populace, we possess the freedom and means to present the self as we choose—an ability that no other generation to date has known. Web 2.0 and Social Networking Sites have revolutionized personal communication and expression. They allow us to connect in novel and unprecedented ways, shattering old network paradigms. Ostensibly, geographical boundaries, unspoken class hierarchies, or social status no longer restricts us. By allowing instant and relatively anonymous methods of expression, we are provided with an opportunity to truly explore personas removed from geographically localized cultural frameworks that try to define who we are through the use of often arbitrary social constructs.

 

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With the availability to perform for an audience to which we hold no accountability, we are truly afforded freedom of identity. So why— when faced with the intoxicating possibility of the infinite—do we choose to imitate each other? My interest does not lie in our differences, but rather, our similarities. My work investigates this idea in addition to others dealing specifically with interconnectivity. The progression of popular trends on the web combined with their meanings, effects and usefulness in our culture is a rapidly moving target. I examine the internet and its usefulness in popular culture by gathering and rearranging readily available data to make new statements about it, and gain many new understandings of our habits as gregarious, selfish, hopeful, happy, sad, lonely and most importantly, forthcoming, beings.

 

 

BootyMeat -2010- Video 1:30


 

Susanne Schuda

The bir(d)th - 2007/08 - video - 22:34

The bir(d)th is an interactive 3D narration where users can choose their perspective. 2 permanent mutating figures in a 3D living room are watching TV and having sex. In the TV there is a show about shabby charity events, a talk show about the essence of fear, and an advertisement for Worldview insurance. The figures in the living room are 2D collaged images from Internet material and animated in 3D.

 

 

Ulf Kristiansen (Norway)

The Art Reception - 2010 - video - 11 min

The Art Reception is a self-biographical black machinima comedy about artistic failure. A figurative painter holds an art reception. The critics and the audience are less than impressed by his art project (depicting male porn stars) and they tell him so. He does not take the criticism well. He loses his mind completely and starts hallucinating before passing out. In his dreams he gets his revenge. But dreams are short-lived.

 

Sheila Bishop (Florida, USA)

sa.lacio.uslyLearningToSayNo - 2006 to 20010 video capture of video hosting website - 10 min

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Here's the story. I post one of my early video pieces LearningToSayNo on Medicine Films. I want to reach a larger audience than I would if I uploaded it to one of my websites. I want the work to be part of a community conversation. I want the distribution power of a video-sharing site. Medicine Films allows users to label work "mature." It is one of the few video-hosting sites that allows mixed content. YouTube does not allow mature material- at least according to their rules, and I am a bit of a goody-goody. I want this piece to be labeled "mature" because it contains graphic descriptions of a bad sexual experience. It is meant for adults. Regardless of my various, sometimes contradictory, feelings about porn, I do not consider this video porn, so I do not look for a porn hosting site. I post the video. I send the link around. People watch it. Months pass. Over 1800 people watch the video. A year passes. I click on the small screenshot that should take me to the video and thus to the link I want, but I am taken away from Medicine Films and driven to sa.lacio.us: a website of social bookmarking for adults. My video about bad sex now lives surrounded by bad (or perhaps I should say uninteresting to me) porn on three sides. I wish someone had told me that all my "mature" work would be framed by bignaturals.com Glue Torture Three Girls in a Car!!!

I decided to make that whole experience into a brand new piece, to frame it as art instead of chance. In the video itself as well as its juxtaposition within the porn portal, I am trying to get at the ways in which sex, sexism and sexuality awkwardly dance together to create our experiences. Just like the man described in the story I narrate, porn is not all bad. It is not all his or its fault. But porn has an affect. We can never know precisely what that affect is, but we should look closely all the same. Some art is pornographic. Some porn is artful. But there are few, if any, communal places online for explicit video work about sex to exist without being framed by porn because video work that is explicit about sex, in our culture, can only be one thing, porn. I believe this is disservice to porn as well as to art.

 

Yuliya Lanina (New York)

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Mishka - 2008 - video - 5 min

"Mishka" is a playful depiction of human nature and of our culture. The main protagonist, Mishka, a little monkey with a human face, is tired of his corruptive life. He goes from one doll party to another without much joy or engagement. All of a sudden a three-eyed crawling creature appears and brings Mishka to a mysterious place of possible innocence. But Mishka's motivations are tainted and he is taken to hell by the mother bird. His death is imminent. Mishka is killed by an inwardly tortured death character while being observed by human monkeys and fornicating carrots. But his life goes on. He comes back as a mechanical doll whose only purpose is to entertain.

 

 

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Bible Reader - 2009 - stop motion animation - 2 min

 

Owen Eric Wood

Lost

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The performative dimension plays a vital role in a great number of Wood's videos. The artist himself is present in his work in order to challenge concepts of identity whereby individuals must constantly reinvent or appropriate their own image. The artist dismantles the wheels of such processes while blurring the line between fiction and reality. Performance and self portraiture are at the heart of the Owen Eric Wood's art practice. As an interdisciplinary artist, he incorporates drawing, sculpture, photography and installation in his videos to reflect existential themes.

Made Up

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Ron Yeshoua (Tel Aviv, Israel)

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The search for love in urban landscapes is the focus of my work. The movement between loneliness and the search for communications has metamorphosed from the personal to the political. The humane has not become a vessel of representation, a metaphor, leading to the quest for security in a deconstructed world.  In the virtual age reality has become a separate independent question that is becoming rephrased and investigated a new, both the physical reality which we inhabit and the virtual reality. It is the dialog between those two types of realities that has made the metaphors into specters in the new world. These specters thus serves as representations of reality and mirages at the same time.

My work is heavily influenced by Jacques Derrida and his theory of deconstruction. In particular I place emphasis on the search for meaning in a world that has no security and no safe foothold. Even things that are tantalizingly real can no longer be relied on in such a world and henceforth we are lead to examine the meaning of love under such conditions.

I construe that those special settings the self evolves into an explorer whose foray into reality results in the construction of a new language. This is what I endeavor to achieve with my camera work. By introspecting the seemingly familiar actuality we find out how slight our familiarity has been. The works employs the contrast between beclouded and the clear, the reality as captured from the computer screen versus the physical reality presented in the same space.

My works are best presented when projected not at they size they have been composed in thus further enhancing their spectral nature. This serves to underlie the ghostly nature of the virtual world.

Samuel D. York

nicebooty, 2009

This work explores the well documented phenomenon of "booty poppin" videos existing on the popular user generated content platform YouTube. The video loop displays a Firefox browser caught in an infinite feedback loop as it streams a readymade flv file of a woman shaking her "donk." I feel that the video peers into the infinity mirror generated by contemporary culture. YouTube users are in rapid exhibitonist competition for the most subscribers to their page, most views to their vlog. In this form of Cyber-Darwinism one of the best ways to gain many veiwers is with semi-explicit or highly sexualized content. YouTube is the ideal format for the work as the video draws veiwers entering related search terms, interupting their search for elusory sexual content. Nudity is censored from YouTube.

Hrvoje Slovenc

October Bliss - 2010 - photography - 30 x 65 "

I am interested in life as a form of theater, particularly in ways domestic space has been acted in and acted upon. I am intrigued by the “scenes” that people construct in their homes with all their semiotic referents not just to their individual pleasures but, more importantly, to the ones that are socially prescribed. What fascinates me is the subtle mix between the notions of fantasy and reality; the constructed and the found; as well as performed and lived experience. In the series Home Theater I am photographing domestic spaces in which sadomasochistic sex acts are taking place. The predilections of sex in this work metaphorize the other aspects of our lives that are so highly ritualized.

October Bliss

 
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