Inside meatspace

In Vex Ashley’s film Machine Learning Experiments, a body – she, they, he, them, take your pick – is penetrated by a luminescent black tube. The body’s boundaries dissolve in the pleasure of becoming: animate/inanimate, human/non-human, interior and exterior, inorganic and inorganic. Backed by the steady pulse of Boy Harsher’s Augustus Muller, the series’ tripartite sequence – ‘Automation’, ‘Orgone Theory’, ‘Hydra’ (this last ‘about invading and consuming’) – offers a psychosocial exploration of transmission and penetrability of all kinds.

Can mediation mean otherwise? Is there a vision of the human body within the machine that is not fetishistic compulsion, technofuturist kink, colonial yuppie wet dream? (I do not mean to impute shame or implications of abnormality to anyone’s compulsions or kinks; all of these responses, insofar as they do not turn others into resources, are potentially valid psychosexual links to a violent world.) Zones of extraction emerge: the ability to touch what is distant in time and space, yet still rendered safe by the confines of meditation. This yields an attractive value proposition for commercial forces seeking to turn material and psychic objects and rituals into commodities.