Performers: Melia Chendo & Jackson King
This mixed media performance extends Hands on Foucault (2025) into a technologically mediated field of autoerotic reading, centering the body as an interface. Drawing on Michel Foucault’s concept of the “experience-book,” the piece stages masturbation not as a private act but as a discursive relay: a live, unstable translation between desire, language, and control. Chendo’s video layering text and Lumetri scope as visual instruments translates motion into fluctuating fields of color and legibility. King developed a custom Python script using MediaPipe to track the performer’s gestures—most centrally, the recursive motion of the hand—and transmit this data via OSC to MaxMSP and Ableton Live, where it dynamically modulates projections and sound. The body does not simply produce meaning; it parameterizes it.
Chendo performs masturbation (parodically reading The History of Sexuality) and spoken text. Visually and conceptually, the work is in dialogue with Carolee Schneemann’s Interior Scroll (1975), attributing agency to the clitoris as a critique of Western phallocentrism and invoking an “unraveling” that never resolves. Here, however, the scroll is replaced by code, feedback loops, and the spectral doubling of the performer’s image. The hand that touches becomes multiplied, tracked, and delayed.
Incorporating theoretical tensions developed through Chendo’s writing, the performance foregrounds resistance to Foucault’s refusal of desire as a category. Masturbation becomes a site where discourse is not merely imposed but erotically reactivated. The audience is implicated in a transferential field: projections flicker between legibility and abstraction, while sound responds to the intensity and rhythm of touch.
The result is a disorienting feedback system in which reading becomes masturbatory, and masturbation becomes a method of reading—an ongoing, incomplete attempt to locate desire within, against, and through discourse.