<aside> 🔴 Summary: How body parts like eyes ("fuck me eyes") or mouth ("dick-sucking mouth") or bruised knees ("she must be on her knees a lot") are often overly sexualised.
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What excited me about this week's assignment is the presence, or the isolation/disembodiment, of the body in online spaces. In some of my other classes (Streaming against the Current and Cybernetics of Sex), there have been many discussions about decriminalising sex workers, the fetishization of body parts (esp female), how many curse words are based on female reproductive organs, and generally how body parts (like feet or mouth) can be overly sexualised in an online space.
I initially wanted to do some sort of mouth chart or karaoke-like activity that focuses on the shapes of the mouth.
The reading from last week (how the artist felt uncomfortable, watching her digital self being violated by another person) was striking, it made me think about how gender identities and coded items like knives continue to have a pervasive effect on us in both worlds.
Lip tracking mesh
For this particular sketch, what I wanted to achieve was to capture the difference in proximity/distance (how the text's size change when I'm standing far away vs when I'm up close against the webcam). I like how the text is not legible at first glance, and the viewer must make an effort to move and play around with their mouth shape in order to read the content. Mouth/lips are frequently sensualised/sexualised, and insults like "suck a dick" are often tossed at both females (reducing females down to sex objects) and males (implying that homosexuality is a weakness) as a way to dehumanize and shame them.
There is something intriguing about this form of disembodiment, and how the machine immediately picks out my mouth and projected this set of text right onto it. Like a sticky label that cannot be removed.
And it's interesting that both actions would have not happened if I did not program it to behave that way. In a way, the way this sketch was programmed mirrors how we, as humans, were also programmed to specifically sexualise these body parts.