Beginning in December 2024 I began offering a tape recorder at queer sex parties and public cruising events. The tape recorder was offered in private to semi-public locations at these events ranging from an enclosed bathroom, above the sinks outside a bathroom, to a table next to a curtained off dark room at a rave. The recorder was accompanied by text on a laminated sheet of paper. An hour of audio spanning over a year has been collected and compiled. I presented the audio in video recorded listening stations, requiring the listener to enter into an exhibitionist contract with myself and the public to voyeuristically engage with the audio.

The video sets into conversation two concepts, centuries apart: Paul Preciado’s pharmacopornographic and the mythos of Elizabeth Bathory. The concept of the pharmacopornographic is a recognition of the intertwining efforts of the pharmaceutical and pornography industries to determine the literal shapes of human life within the 20th to 21st century. Elizabeth Bathory, meanwhile, was the 16th century noblewoman accused of torturing hundreds of townspeople, with the myth eventually twisting into the virginal blood bathing madwoman. Playing beneath the swirling of mythical bloodlust and modern hemoglobic manipulation is the push and pull of interiority versus exteriority as benign and pathological, respectively. I.e. blood is assumingly benign within the body; upon exsanguination a transformation to hazardous occurs.

Performed as part of the Kindling Arts Festival in Nashville, the piece explores my contentious relationship with floral design. Through repetition I seek to disrupt the audience’s relationship to floral arrangements, presenting them as replicable objects marred by the conditions of their creation.