Related: Gender as Social Performance — A separate pass follows gender classification, queerness, masculinity and social attribution rather than folding them into desire.

Desire as projection

The work repeatedly notices how little another person has to do before imagination begins building around them. Adolescent fixation, strangers, old photographs, lovers, ex-lovers, online figures and synthetic persons become screens onto which desire writes faster than knowledge can keep up.

Intimacy and mediation

Phones, photographs, recordings, social platforms, generated images, songs and names do not merely interrupt intimacy; they create new kinds of it. The Electronic Lover material makes this explicit, but the current is much older. The work asks whether mediation extends contact, replaces it, possesses it, or reveals that intimacy was always partly imaginative.

Love with teeth

Sentiment is rarely allowed to remain pure. Romance is crossed with money, sex, embarrassment, power, memory and comic obscenity. Yet tenderness persists. Friends, lovers, dogs, dead parents and brief social encounters periodically become the only reason a damaged world remains worth inhabiting.

Selected works

Crossings

Synthetic Intimacy / Manufactured Personhood · The Strange Case of the Electronic Lover · Love / intimacy / family quotations