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I intervene in gay.com chat rooms specific to the gallery’s region by facilitating conversations with men online who identify as not-gay but curious. I lure them into chatting with me by appearing on a webcam in my underwear - tanned and pumped full of Viagra, then chat with them about their history with safer sex, desire for men and their self-identification. I then invite them to my hotel to act as a sexual surrogate and put into practice the safer sex decision-making behaviors we had discussed. The 'Art' audience is invited to witness my recapping and paraphrasing done within the main chatroom, otherwise they are able to watch me on my webcam in-between participants.
blog excerpt by Paul Couillard,
(performance artist; former director of FADO Canada’s Performance Art Artist-Run Centre;
festival Animateur for VisualEyez 2003)
“Up until now, my questioning has all been directed at Mikiki -- asking him to map the limits of this sexualized terrain for me, to outline his screening process, to show me the operands at play […]. I have assumed that this is a verbal process, one that can be described, simulated and reduced to a formula. Now that Mikiki has shifted his focus into the hotel room, my questions and assumptions fall away. We are all here in this room together, and now we have all reached a consensus that we are in Mikiki's performance. Whether my own trajectory from online chat to this moment was necessary, whether it represents a linear progression, whether it can be understood as Mikiki's and my particular negotiation process, what relationship it has to the […] bodies in the room, are all questions that I cannot accurately answer. We have entered each other's space -- a place that is more than a verbal process, and one that cannot be described, simulated and reduced to a formula. More importantly, it is an all-ways process. In order for us to come to this place together, and to find out where it might lead, I must turn all of the questions that I have asked Mikiki onto myself -- just as he must turn all of the questions he has asked me, verbally or in other ways, onto himself.”
performance intervention
AKA Artist-Run Centre
Saskatoon SK 2002
VisualEyez Performance Festival
Edmonton AB 2003
Centre for Art Tapes
Halifax NS 2005