SANCTUM

SANCTUM

2018

SANCTUM is a mystical environment that perverts sex dungeons with the apparatuses and procedures of airport body scans, biometric analysis, and predictive policing. Amidst metal chains, a stretching rack, douche hoses, a steel mesh anal hook, spanking posts, and a sacramental altar, the rapturous desire to expose oneself to digital platforms is made manifest.

SANCTUM probes the correlations of digital exposure and control, of belief and desire, which arouse both joy and injury. SANCTUM also identifies a distorted reimagining of the power dynamics of BDSM at the heart of contemporary surveillance: an opulent display of desire and capture, exposure and punishment, dominance and submission.

In SANCTUM, a masked figure exposes captured “generic mannequins”—a corporate term for digital representations of bodies that are examined for risks and anomalies during airport body scans—to sexual stimulation, punishment, and spiritual ecstasy. As prisoners, sex slaves, worshippers, and experimental test subjects, these mannequins experience pleasure, pain, and martyrdom, as they are stretched, scraped, bound, contained, whipped, suspended, dropped, pierced, and mummified. Silent and pliant, the mannequins are also harvested, in order to produce a new line of weapons and sex toys.

SANCTUM is at once a prison-house of algorithmic capture, a sex dungeon with no genitals, a weapons factory, and a temple to security.

Vide si vos aliquid dicere aliquid.
Submit ad scan.
Et reticulum adoremus.
Beati illi, qui est imago-free.
Ave, ProVision!

Credits

  • Commissioned by Julia Kaganskiy; Tentacular: Festival de Tecnologías, Críticas y Aventuras Digitales; and Matadero Madrid
  • Architecture, Design, and 3D Modeling: Scott Kepford
  • 3D Modeling: ScannerWorksNY
  • Fabrication: Feltrero
  • 3D Printing: Xometry
  • Computer Graphics: Harry Sanderson and Daniel Swan
  • Music: xin
  • Audio Mastering: Swan Meat
  • Research and Production Assistant: Dennis Dizon
  • Video Documentation Editor: Isabel Freeman