Hold My Hand Tell Me That You Love Me, 2020
I met the first trans people I ever knew online on sites like DeviantArt and Tumblr, and these sites are also where I first tried out new names and pronouns. On the internet, we as trans people have complete control over our identities and can manifest our true identities via pronouns, names, and virtual personas. This work seeks to merge virtual and physical trans bodies through the creation of a computer case, or skin, that turns a laptop into a living thing, and imagines the computer itself as a trans entity, specifically a character named Tom Cruise, who delivers a monologue. I am fascinated by the celebrity figure of Tom Cruise, who often serves as a stand-in for an archetype of white American masculinity, yet at the same time presents challenges to that very archetype. This work also grapples with the contradiction of wanting to depict the trans body without allowing it to be perceived (or rather, misperceived) by the cis gaze. The fact of the matter is that cis people simply cannot and will never understand the complex and varied relationships that trans people have with their bodies. Any attempt attempt to depict a physical form for the character of Tom Cruise would necessarily always fall short of an ideal body--sometimes, the ideal body is not having a body at all.
This work was heavily influenced by Donna Haraway’s A Cyborg Manifesto and the collective Laboria Cuboniks’ work The Xenofeminist Manifesto: A Politics for Alienation, as well as the experimental book Virus by my friend and contemporary Linda Stupart. I am particularly drawn to the xenofeminist rejection of essentialist naturalism.
With my work, I imagine a universe in which technology is no longer tied to capitalism and is instead in the hands of the people, becoming a tool for gender abolition as it is defined in the XF Manifesto: “the ambition to construct a society where traits currently assembled under the rubric of gender no longer furnish a grid for the asymmetric operation of power”. My work is an attempt to create a virtual identity that is at once truthful and completely anonymous; one which forces cis people to take it at face value but which offers comfort to its trans brethren. This imagined future is also one in which trans people can completely modify their bodies via technology in ways that are not currently possible (that is, becoming completely virtual, and becoming fully embodied through disembodiment); in this future, the character of Tom Cruise, and other trans individuals, hold power and are not tragic figures which garner sympathy from cis audiences. I am interested in imagining sci-fi worlds and futures which are not apocalyptic but instead positive; futures in which people like me and my loved ones not only survive but thrive, and which see technology and science being used to their full potential for radical social change and the realization of emancipatory abolitionist projects.
While the video was originally intended to be shown both with its sculptural component and alongside Valkyrie 2008 (Tom Cruise Fake Ass), it can also stand alone as a digital video on the internet.
2:58 minutes. Soft Sculpture and digital video.
Exhibitions
Flesh Spaces
Header/Footer Gallery at New Media Caucus - July-October 2020
SYSTEM FAILURE: Long Live the New Flesh
Spectacle Theater, NYC - June 2020
Unbounded Unleashed Unforgiving; Reconsidering Cyberfeminism in 2021
New Art City - February 2021
This work was heavily influenced by Donna Haraway’s A Cyborg Manifesto and the collective Laboria Cuboniks’ work The Xenofeminist Manifesto: A Politics for Alienation, as well as the experimental book Virus by my friend and contemporary Linda Stupart. I am particularly drawn to the xenofeminist rejection of essentialist naturalism.
With my work, I imagine a universe in which technology is no longer tied to capitalism and is instead in the hands of the people, becoming a tool for gender abolition as it is defined in the XF Manifesto: “the ambition to construct a society where traits currently assembled under the rubric of gender no longer furnish a grid for the asymmetric operation of power”. My work is an attempt to create a virtual identity that is at once truthful and completely anonymous; one which forces cis people to take it at face value but which offers comfort to its trans brethren. This imagined future is also one in which trans people can completely modify their bodies via technology in ways that are not currently possible (that is, becoming completely virtual, and becoming fully embodied through disembodiment); in this future, the character of Tom Cruise, and other trans individuals, hold power and are not tragic figures which garner sympathy from cis audiences. I am interested in imagining sci-fi worlds and futures which are not apocalyptic but instead positive; futures in which people like me and my loved ones not only survive but thrive, and which see technology and science being used to their full potential for radical social change and the realization of emancipatory abolitionist projects.
While the video was originally intended to be shown both with its sculptural component and alongside Valkyrie 2008 (Tom Cruise Fake Ass), it can also stand alone as a digital video on the internet.
2:58 minutes. Soft Sculpture and digital video.
Exhibitions
Flesh Spaces
Header/Footer Gallery at New Media Caucus - July-October 2020
SYSTEM FAILURE: Long Live the New Flesh
Spectacle Theater, NYC - June 2020
Unbounded Unleashed Unforgiving; Reconsidering Cyberfeminism in 2021
New Art City - February 2021
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