action! sex and the moving-image.

the second floor of the museum of sex is hosting an exhibit entitled ‘action! sex and the moving-image’ which traces the development of sex in film. spanning over a hundred years, sex in the moving-image underwent a variety of transformations mediated by regulatory codes and laws at different points in history.

the room of ‘action!’ was illuminated with a dark blue. tiny television screens adorned a wall in the room’s center and the surface of raised blocks functioned as screens for other video clips. the visibility and audibility of films with adult content and porn queered this curatorial space by rendering indistinguishable the public and private. brianne and i navigated this perverse space by viewing close-ups of blowjobs, anal sex, and the like with complete strangers. we strangely felt discomfort and allure at the same time and as the same sensation, in the time and space we shared with others. this queer intimacy in which not a word circulated amongst strangers while erotic sensations did brought together normally and normatively private matters into public spaces while leaving each experience irreducibly singular. a heterotopia to the dominant society of sexual control, ‘action!’ thus enacts a politics of sexual aesthetics reconfiguring the proper place of sex and the curatorial to queer the traffic of bodies walking through and stopping still in a proximity too close for comfort yet too far for commonality.

partitions of the audible.

 

noah and i discovered last night that the walls in our hotel, the pod (a name aptly describing the rooms’ sizes), are quite thin. residing at the top floor of ‘the pod’ next to a stairwell leading to the rooftop, we were frequently suffered the noises of loud voices and clattering footsteps throughout the early hours of the morning. and although noah missed it, i twice heard a woman in heat (selective hearing? how is the aural framed?). the private became the public in the transmission of the audibly orgasmic.

sound, it seems, crosses material boundaries and invades our worlds. while riding the subway and pointing out the infiltration of the visual by a swarm of budweiser ads, noah mentioned that in thailand, trams are filled with screens and speakers that play televisual ads (such as trailers of movies). understandably, then, part of the appeal of personal music devices is protecting one’s sensible world in a restricting of the audible range.

but who can afford one’s own audible filters? how does purchasing power condition our encounters with others in the world? and what does this say about capitalism’s relationship with the senses?