UC Santa Cruz

QUEER (BODIES IN PUBLIC) SPACE was an interactive transmedia installation which incorporated a multitude of technologies to create an immersive environment of light and sound, focused on a central object - a sex sling fabricated from materials purchased through official university funding. The sling hung by chains under red light in the center of the vaulted gallery space while a noisy Heavy Metal soundtrack played. At opposite corners of the room were flickering televisions that blared out audio accounts of revelatory group sexual experiences atop two roughly hand-crafted oversized podiums. Drilled into the podiums themselves were glory holes which revealed tableaus of queer sexuality and voyeurism, one of which featured a lofty camera feed of the room, in addition to a second camera within which captured and projected the hole-gazer’s face onto the back wall of the gallery as they peered inside - a closed-circuit loop.

The room was otherwise dark, but if a visitor mounted the sling, their body, read by a third (thermal) camera above, was projected on the remaining three walls of the space, lighting the room and through computational processes clarifying the distorted electric guitar soundtrack of the space into a mellow clubby refrain by reducing certain audio channels in response to the brightness of the body heat map.

As in a play party setting, a single body carried by an act of vulnerable exhibitionism transformed the space and allowed others to “cruise” around and investigate the experience. Built upon the research of Gayle Rubin, John Rechy, and others, this thesis “QUEER (BODIES IN PUBLIC) SPACE” challenged viewers to interrogate their conceptions of a queered body in a gallery setting while simultaneously gesturing towards the potentiality of sexually charged queer spaces at large - proposing a dialogue between the architecturally and aesthetically erotic experience of play parties, and the ofttimes puritanical leanings of a sterile research institution.