“Cruising Kink” is a multilayered installation with handmade tools, performances, video projection mapping, AI generated text and soundscapes. Inspired by interviews with (online) sex workers, BDSM practices, community care, somatic experiences, and the queer kink scene, the research focuses on tricks of the trade. Sculpted to reinvent the self and its environment, “Cruising Kink Gates” gives expression to needs within the field of setting boundaries, what it means to be visible, to give space, and to let go. 

It aims to organize a system of visibility, representation, right of self-determination – as something feeling-authentic, as a sense of coming-home from a perspective of the complexity of life, where friction, strangeness or dissonance create a space of imagination in and through which a multitude of undefined positions can exist alongside one another. 

Natural pine branches form the background of this multilayered video installation. Two-part, flower-like bud, pink, red, blue-colored, transparent sap form as a drop at one of the tops, digitally manipulated. Tools designed with aluminum pouring and sand casting, performed with green screen, rendered in an otherworldly setting, accompanied with AI generated text.  

Data from the interviews and public platforms such as FetLife train the lGPT-2 models, which intake a sentence or partial sentence and predict subsequent text, question-answering, and summary of long articles.  

In this case, the generated text was trained from personal stories, life experiences, questions, general statements and communal guidance around Queer and Kink across the USA into more then 20 samples. All focused on the idea of becoming, agency over the body, and who we are along the way. Every sample generates an experimental enthusiasm of a constituent process that is constantly open.  

What interests me in this process are the personal, yet anonymous phrases and cognitive differences at these platforms, as a basic model, which mingle into one communal text, accumulating like points: surprisingly poetic, sometimes abstract, or elusive.  

An excerpt:  

“Sexual: not kinky, not kinky kinky, not kinky kinky  

Sexualism: interested in physical things, sexual places, places that are physical.   

Sexual sensuality is a sub-type of sexual interest. Sex involves desire for place, surface, object, rhythm, direction, energy, so on. Sexuality involves places, objects, energies, parts.   

Sexual activity involves things like touch, smell, taste, type, amount, quality, and rhythm. Sexual energy is often subtle but has some relation to place.   

Sexual nature is a dynamic process with changes happening in places that are not seen or mentioned in numbers.”  

The object is designed with aluminum sand casting, performed with green screen at the Media Lab.  

Performer: Merel Noorlander

Photo: Jae Song

Object developed in collaboration with Linda Sanchez  

Many thanks to Iris Eichenbergthe and the Methalsmithing Department at Cranbrook Academy of Art, 2022 .