Katherine Behar
Pipecleaner, 2007
“3D-Pipes,” a kitschy late-90s Microsoft screensaver is the lo-fi setting for a quirky post-feminist intervention. Wearing a dress made out of cleaning gloves, a pole dancer invades the screensaver’s maze of pipes. Her spins, gyrations, and efforts to climb and clean the pipes become absurd when reduced to byte-sized edits that mimic the original screensaver’s recombinant logic.
3G56k, 2009
3G56k is an intergenerational BDSM love affair between a touchscreen and a tower. A twelve-foot iPhone, outfitted in fetish garb and sporting an interactive touchscreen, employs the services of a human “dialer” and to call its love interest: a dialup modem inside a feminized, phallic, ten-foot tall, pink tower computer.
3G56k’s touchscreen functions like an iPhone keypad on which the numbers have been erased. People are invited to dial numbers by using their entire bodies to roll, sit, squat, press, and rub on its unmarked, user-unfriendly surface. The touchscreen’s microcontroller uses bodily touch input to dial a phone number, accessing a VoIP (Voice over IP) network to place the call, before finally connecting to the tower computer’s 56k modem. With each call, an analog thermal fax slowly excretes through a vaginal zippered opening in the tower, accumulating a continuous, undulating image of the rubber hose connecting these mismatched machine protagonists.
Artist Bio
http://www.katherinebehar.com/
Katherine Behar is an interdisciplinary artist based in New York City. Her installations, performances, and videos mix low and high technologies to portray the condition of living sensuously in digital media. Some of Behar’s recent projects were presented by art centers such as the Chicago Cultural Center, De Balie Centre for Culture and Politics in Amsterdam, and The National Museum of Art in Cluj-Napoca; at festivals including CamouFlash in Dresden, the Mediations Biennale in Poznan, the Digital Live Art Festival in Leeds, PostsovkhoZ 6 in Mooste, and PSi, Conflux, and the D.U.M.B.O. Art Festival, all in New York; and at galleries including Interval in Manchester, CANADA in New York, The Dorsch Gallery in Miami, and the Arizona State University Galleries. Behar is a collaborator in the performance art group Disorientalism with Marianne Kim and has taught on the faculty of the School of the Art Institute of Chicago and Hunter College.
Katherine,
I’m interested in how non-normative or “hypersexual” practices such as BDSM and exotic dancing figure into your practice. These are practices that have been the subjects of intense debate among feminists. The central problem which has yet to be solved, and I’m not sure if it ever can be, is whether women can posses agency in these contexts.
What I find provocative about your practice is that it implicitly recognizes the impossibility of being able to gauge human agency, instead, it seems that the interaction between humans and machines in your work provides a more open-ended method for exploring contemporary sexual subjectivity.
Thanks for taking part in our project.
Jillian
Katherine,
Bravo! for subverting the mindless nature of the screensaver!
I find this work fascinating and would love to read about what compelled you to explore the hypersexual in your work.
My best,
Cathy
Hi Cathy and Jillian,
Thanks for your comments — and for putting together this project!
A couple of thoughts on the “hypersexual” …
Firstly, I’m interested in female sexuality, as it’s been questioned by feminist and psychoanalytic thought, in and of itself; yet in these works I want to talk about explicit sexuality in order to explicitly talk about our relationships with technology – the real subject of my work. Ultimately, I believe that sexual practices (of any flavor) and Human-Computer Interaction (HCI) are two kinds of communications interfaces. In my opinion, these two communications interfaces “make sense” together and are worth investigating comparatively because both structure relationships in terms of power and control. I think that Jillian is touching on this when she brings up the issue of agency. Moreover, hypersexual interfaces code our interactions toward an aggressive intimacy, dictating the terms for interaction without a lot of foreplay, just like computer user interfaces do.
In the popular imagination, and in HCI practice, relationships between people and machines are conceived of in terms such as dominance, assimilation, deliverance, anxiety over lost agency, etc. The same could be said (and indeed has been said) in the context of women assuming “hypersexual” subject positions. Treating the sexual as hypersexual — that is, as processed through many recursive rounds of cultural conditioning — is one way to emphasize that such interfaces are constructs. As such, they become open to critique, which is where, I hope, these projects come in.
As for the “hypersexual” itself, I’m taken by the neologisms that come up when sexuality, rendered explicit, seems to exceed the term itself. The “hypersexual” is one; another that was recently used to describe my work is “comic-sexual.” A follow-up question necessarily becomes, what is the merely “sexual”? What sexuality doesn’t make it to the level of being “hyper” or “comic” (or “meta” or “tragic”)?
Best,
Katherine
I’m compelled by your parallel of Human-Computer Interaction and sexual practice Katherine, especially as it relates to power. This is an area that has not been fully developed in academic feminism, but your art is certainly producing the theory.
Have you read Celine Parrenas Shimizu’s book “The Hypersexuality of Race: Performing Asian/American Women on Screen and Scene”? It has been really influential on my work and complicates the standard discourses circulating in women’s studies about the “hypersexual”. Shimizu really troubles that term (as it tends to give a negative valuation to non-normative practices women may engage in and find pleasurable, such as BDSM).
J