Through Interior Profile I wanted to explore how the chemsex sub-culture is a microcosm of a broader phenomenon in millennial culture – how the sites where identity and community are negotiated, although seemingly more public and participative, risk becoming increasingly isolating.
The chemsex subculture defines a community around a particular specific act – of artificially enhanced sex. The different aspects of the practice of chemsex seeks to remove all other distractions: bodies are selected using purely visual cues and the act itself is prolonged ad infinitum through the consumption of chemicals.
Chemsex parties take place in domestic settings, in large cities where queer bodies congregate. A smart phone grants access to web of invitations played out in real-time. The communal experience of the club or bar is removed – people are not drawn together by a shared love of music, conversation and other non-verbal forms of communication such as clothing are not required. What happens to queer culture and community when more and more events are held in private homes? Queer spaces such as bars and clubs are closing down in most major cities. Can this change be linked to these changes in behaviour?
Invitations are solicited using digital platforms where the users are filtered by proximity alone. Anonymous images of the body, presented to their best advantage, are circulated. These images often include unintended visual meta-data: glimpses of the private places in which these rarefied images were taken, at times obsessively ordered, untidy or sometimes squalid living conditions – further underlining what is privileged in gay culture.
Bodies are presented in a limited repertoire of poses. Constantly reviewing these similar images becomes hypnotic and meditative – a mirror of the altered states induced by the chemicals. In fact, the review of imagery often continues throughout the parties – sometimes during the act of sex itself.
The digital platforms make an individual available for consumption by an infinite number of others. A key motivator is the desire for adulation – these are competitive arenas where all are seeking the hottest, most attractive encounter, something which could be validating to both parties, but becomes impossible under the influence off substances that multiply desire and deny satisfaction. Although on a grander scale the process removes the individual from all of the other arenas where identity and community have previously been negotiated.
Technology and chemistry conspire to reduce gay culture and community to a single physical act, premised on the ability to present a desirable physical body. Thus chemsex magnifies particular aspects of the negotiation of self and community whilst negating others.
Through Interior Profile, I wanted to use different ways of seeing and experiencing to explore these themes. I have created an experience where the viewer must scrutinise the imagery to understand what is represented but where that scrutiny is both stabilising, offering something familiar and anchoring but also abstract and dislocating.
The domestic space is decorated with images constructed for public consumption. As with all domestic spaces, the room is both private and public and this tension mirrors the public and private dichotomy of the way images are created and circulated on the digital platforms.
Repetition is a key way in which meaning is created in Interior Profile. The repetition has a hypnotic effect, which mirrors both the constant review of similar imagery via the digital platforms and the altered states induced by the chems. Often in meditation, the conscious mind is switched off and the repetitive patterns, which recall sacred geometry, aims to recreate this effect in the viewer. Interior Profile reworks the source images using different media – sometimes digital, sometimes analogue. The images are rendered as emojis, lines, abstract shapes. This underlines the artifice of the imagery and the fact that the body must be filtered through different lenses before it is presented online.
It is therefore important to me that Interior Profile is presented as an immersive experience, as close to the physical setting of a chemsex session as the space will allow; Ideally in very sparsely furnished flat or apartment The viewer enters the space it is dark, the curtains are drawn to keep the sunlight out. There are extra mattresses laid out in the living space, and fitted bed sheet cover any chairs and sofas, reminiscent of a children’s birthday party. The only light in the rooms come from low level lamps and the light emitted from the screens of multiple phones tablets and laptops – each device relating to a user – implied, but absent. All of the devices will be plugged into the power sockets – a clear visual display of an endless supply of artificial energy. The screens will be running short looped video clips that have been made from found footage that has been made to advertise or record a sex party or encounter and then shared digitally through social media. While the images on the videos has been rendered abstract the sound remains largely unchanged. The combination of the sounds from all the different devices combine to made and undefinable soundscape. Ever-changing as loops of different lengths come in and out of synch. As the viewer approaches different screens individual sounds will become clearer. One wall in the apartment will be papered with wallpaper made from the repeated and fragmented images that are circulated. The behaviour and ephemeral images created by the changes in technology becoming part of the architecture of the space.
Interior Profile is an ambitious piece. It uses different ways of experiencing and seeing to both stabilise and de-stabilise the viewer as a metaphor for the negotiation of the boundaries between self and other; isolation and community; interior and exterior; excitement and boredom; beauty and disgust: rapture and wretchedness. Suggesting an uneasy ambiguity about the subject matter. The work obviously raises uneasy questions about the implications of these new forms of bodily meetings, but the imagery itself is beautiful, seductive and mesmerising. Interior Profiles connects to the I/WE/THEY theme exactly in these questions: How does the growing sub-culture around chemsex affect where the limits of the self extend and where the social bodies of group and community begin? – Chemsex is a culture born of the capabilities gained from new technologies that have already fundamentally transformed the lived experience of many – in these changes, what has been lost, and what gained?
I believe that the Modern Body Festival is the perfect setting for this piece. Within the exhibition the themes which I explore will be highlighted and enriched, given important context in how it complements and contradicts the other works of art in the exhibition.
The chemsex subculture defines a community around a particular specific act – of artificially enhanced sex. The different aspects of the practice of chemsex seeks to remove all other distractions: bodies are selected using purely visual cues and the act itself is prolonged ad infinitum through the consumption of chemicals.
Chemsex parties take place in domestic settings, in large cities where queer bodies congregate. A smart phone grants access to web of invitations played out in real-time. The communal experience of the club or bar is removed – people are not drawn together by a shared love of music, conversation and other non-verbal forms of communication such as clothing are not required. What happens to queer culture and community when more and more events are held in private homes? Queer spaces such as bars and clubs are closing down in most major cities. Can this change be linked to these changes in behaviour?
Invitations are solicited using digital platforms where the users are filtered by proximity alone. Anonymous images of the body, presented to their best advantage, are circulated. These images often include unintended visual meta-data: glimpses of the private places in which these rarefied images were taken, at times obsessively ordered, untidy or sometimes squalid living conditions – further underlining what is privileged in gay culture.
Bodies are presented in a limited repertoire of poses. Constantly reviewing these similar images becomes hypnotic and meditative – a mirror of the altered states induced by the chemicals. In fact, the review of imagery often continues throughout the parties – sometimes during the act of sex itself.
The digital platforms make an individual available for consumption by an infinite number of others. A key motivator is the desire for adulation – these are competitive arenas where all are seeking the hottest, most attractive encounter, something which could be validating to both parties, but becomes impossible under the influence off substances that multiply desire and deny satisfaction. Although on a grander scale the process removes the individual from all of the other arenas where identity and community have previously been negotiated.
Technology and chemistry conspire to reduce gay culture and community to a single physical act, premised on the ability to present a desirable physical body. Thus chemsex magnifies particular aspects of the negotiation of self and community whilst negating others.
Through Interior Profile, I wanted to use different ways of seeing and experiencing to explore these themes. I have created an experience where the viewer must scrutinise the imagery to understand what is represented but where that scrutiny is both stabilising, offering something familiar and anchoring but also abstract and dislocating.
The domestic space is decorated with images constructed for public consumption. As with all domestic spaces, the room is both private and public and this tension mirrors the public and private dichotomy of the way images are created and circulated on the digital platforms.
Repetition is a key way in which meaning is created in Interior Profile. The repetition has a hypnotic effect, which mirrors both the constant review of similar imagery via the digital platforms and the altered states induced by the chems. Often in meditation, the conscious mind is switched off and the repetitive patterns, which recall sacred geometry, aims to recreate this effect in the viewer. Interior Profile reworks the source images using different media – sometimes digital, sometimes analogue. The images are rendered as emojis, lines, abstract shapes. This underlines the artifice of the imagery and the fact that the body must be filtered through different lenses before it is presented online.
It is therefore important to me that Interior Profile is presented as an immersive experience, as close to the physical setting of a chemsex session as the space will allow; Ideally in very sparsely furnished flat or apartment The viewer enters the space it is dark, the curtains are drawn to keep the sunlight out. There are extra mattresses laid out in the living space, and fitted bed sheet cover any chairs and sofas, reminiscent of a children’s birthday party. The only light in the rooms come from low level lamps and the light emitted from the screens of multiple phones tablets and laptops – each device relating to a user – implied, but absent. All of the devices will be plugged into the power sockets – a clear visual display of an endless supply of artificial energy. The screens will be running short looped video clips that have been made from found footage that has been made to advertise or record a sex party or encounter and then shared digitally through social media. While the images on the videos has been rendered abstract the sound remains largely unchanged. The combination of the sounds from all the different devices combine to made and undefinable soundscape. Ever-changing as loops of different lengths come in and out of synch. As the viewer approaches different screens individual sounds will become clearer. One wall in the apartment will be papered with wallpaper made from the repeated and fragmented images that are circulated. The behaviour and ephemeral images created by the changes in technology becoming part of the architecture of the space.
Interior Profile is an ambitious piece. It uses different ways of experiencing and seeing to both stabilise and de-stabilise the viewer as a metaphor for the negotiation of the boundaries between self and other; isolation and community; interior and exterior; excitement and boredom; beauty and disgust: rapture and wretchedness. Suggesting an uneasy ambiguity about the subject matter. The work obviously raises uneasy questions about the implications of these new forms of bodily meetings, but the imagery itself is beautiful, seductive and mesmerising. Interior Profiles connects to the I/WE/THEY theme exactly in these questions: How does the growing sub-culture around chemsex affect where the limits of the self extend and where the social bodies of group and community begin? – Chemsex is a culture born of the capabilities gained from new technologies that have already fundamentally transformed the lived experience of many – in these changes, what has been lost, and what gained?
I believe that the Modern Body Festival is the perfect setting for this piece. Within the exhibition the themes which I explore will be highlighted and enriched, given important context in how it complements and contradicts the other works of art in the exhibition.