SANCTUM

Blas, Zach. 2018. SANCTUM. [Art Object]

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Item Type:

Art Object
Creators: Blas, Zach
Abstract or Description:

SANCTUM is a mystical environment that perverts sex dungeons with the apparatuses and procedures of airport body scans, biometric analysis, and predictive policing. Amidst metal chains, a stretching rack, douche hoses, a steel mesh anal hook, spanking posts, and a sacramental altar, the rapturous desire to expose oneself to digital platforms is made manifest.

SANCTUM probes the correlations of digital exposure and control, of belief and desire, which arouse both joy and injury. SANCTUM also identifies a distorted reimagining of the power dynamics of BDSM at the heart of contemporary surveillance: an opulent display of desire and capture, exposure and punishment, dominance and submission.

In SANCTUM, a masked figure exposes captured “generic mannequins”—a corporate term for digital representations of bodies that are examined for risks and anomalies during airport body scans—to sexual stimulation, punishment, and spiritual ecstasy. As prisoners, sex slaves, worshippers, and experimental test subjects, these mannequins experience pleasure, pain, and martyrdom, as they are stretched, scraped, bound, contained, whipped, suspended, dropped, pierced, and mummified. Silent and pliant, the mannequins are also harvested, in order to produce a new line of weapons and sex toys.

SANCTUM is at once a prison-house of algorithmic capture, a sex dungeon with no genitals, a weapons factory, and a temple to security.

Vide si vos aliquid dicere aliquid.
Submit ad scan.
Et reticulum adoremus.
Beati illi, qui est imago-free.
Ave, ProVision!

Official URL: http://www.zachblas.info/works/sanctum/
Departments, Centres and Research Units: Visual Cultures
Item ID: 24982
Date Deposited: 09 Nov 2018 14:36
Last Modified: 14 Nov 2018 09:24

URI:

https://research.gold.ac.uk/id/eprint/24982

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