NON BINARY LAB explores the relationship between organs and sexuality, questioning traditional constructs and common design language of commercial sex toys. Who defines an organ? What is an organ?
NBL sheds light on new services and desires about identity politics, opening doors to propositions and possibilities, with video, foldable kinetic design and performance. It also invites the viewer to take a closer look at the epilogue of our personal stories, within the realities of gender fluidity through a closer look at sex toys.
We all have the power to transform and change our feelings and thoughts between desire and body, technique and consciousness.
Can we reinvent the self? Now that 3D bio-printing has become a reality, it will be possible to print every sex organ. Can we perceive our organs and bodies as a technical mutant that constantly changes its meaning, as Donna Haraway writes about? I’m also interested in further investigating Paul B. Preciado’s suggestion that trans-bodies don’t exist in biology books, outside of identifying ‘a monster’. As Preciado questions; ‘When can a body be said to exist? Can a body be someone’s property? What if a body is made of signs, image and sound? Can those signs, those images, those sounds be mine even if my body isn’t?
NBL explores the relationship between organs and sexuality, by questioning traditional constructs and common design language of commercial sex toys. And sheds light on new services and desires about identity politics, opening doors to propositions and possibilities, with video, foldable kinetic design and participation.
It also invites the viewer to take a closer look at the epilogue of our personal stories, within the realities of gender fluidity through a closer look at sex toys. We all have the power to transform and change our feelings and thoughts between desire & body, technique and consciousness.
The installation/performance takes place in two rooms, a white waiting room and a blue room. The visitor is invited to take a seat in the first and hand over two copies of their passport. One copy is cut into small pieces with a paper-shredder. A white coat is handed over, it disguises the identity of the underlying visitors’ clothing. The whole performance is set in silence, with only a dialogue with eye contact and plopping de-constructed strokers.
The blue room is entered. Like some public toilets in Amsterdam, blue light makes veins invisible, which equates the visitors in the blue room with the moving objects on a metal cart; commercial strokers of female body parts, transformed into kinetic hybrid designs.
The kinetic objects are partly casted&mold, designed with origami techniques, silicone, strokers, 3D printed parts, programmed with Arduino Uno, motors, switches and batteries. Research material is on display. A video projection shows an original stroker, which slowly disintegrates with a glitch effect, divided into pixels.
Upon leaving the room, the visitor receives the second copy of the passport back, stamped with ‘x/they/them’ research.
The kinetic objects are partly casted&mold, designed with paper folding techniques, silicone, commercial strokers, 3D printed parts (PLA), programmed with Arduino Uno, motors, switches and batteries. Research material is on display. A video projection shows a commercial stroker, which slowly disintegrates with a glitch effect, divided into pixels.
Video registration: Zhuo Chen
Video edit: Merel Noorlander
Photography installation: Brian Kovach
Performers: Brian Kovach & Merel Noorlander
Glitch video in collaboration with Nathan Henry
