In the heart of the warm season, the Phi Center presents an immersive experience on the links between sexuality and virtuality. From dating apps and sex forums to speed dating and different forms of stimulation, the exhibition – restricted to ages 16 and up – is on view until October 31.
The exhibition was designed in close collaboration with Club Sexu and the Luxembourg studio a_Bahn. For the past few years, Club Sexu has been making waves thanks to various projects aimed at raising awareness of a more positive, inclusive and enlightened approach to sexuality: the Dépistafest screening festival, the Friends with Benefits comedy evening, the podcast What do you cum? and several other ideas carried out with tact.
From the outset, we are invited to put a gadget around our neck to start a chat session with MAX, a non-binary conversational robot, who offers to follow us during the visit. We therefore create a profile like on a dating application, we obtain a funny nickname (BraiseEnthousiaste), we greet MAX and we are already invited to enter the first room.
We don’t want to leave MAX hanging, but, as the virtual speed dating instructions are already well advanced, we choose to forget the artificial intelligence (AI) that had welcomed us, in favor of the profiles that arrive on the platform. ‘screen.
You have eight minutes to find the perfect partner by exchanging with an intrusive cat lover, an asexual person and a dominant, among others, often having the possibility of moving on to the next one. The activity is fun, but does not push our thinking further than its initial premise.
We then head into a room called RESULTS, whose walls are lined with images generated by machine learning models. In a nutshell, these images were crafted through millions of porn searches from desired keywords and content. In a world where 20% of searches made on our mobile devices are related to sex or porn, it is interesting to explore the question. We quickly understand that our eyes observe the result of the dominant gaze (white, masculine, cisgender, heterosexual).
Our interest becomes very real when we discover HELLO, a room designed by artist Ianna Book, which has brought together a wide variety of comments, questions and insults received by trans people on dating apps. We feel a heavy load of rejection, clichés, discomfort, curiosity, real interest, prejudice and insecurity of the people with whom they exchange.
On the second floor, we discover VIBRATO, a work supposed to make us think about the difficulty of abandoning the sexual patterns that dictate our practices. We find ourselves facing a red structure with a hole resembling an anus in which we are invited to insert our hand, a clitoris-like growth that we can stimulate and a larger entrance in which we are invited to penetrate. and to move without partitions to generate sounds and reactions.
On the same floor, you can go to a room to discover the context of people who offer their bodies in front of the camera, based on comments made by Internet users.
We end with the station QUEERING THE MAP. It is basically an interactive map with hundreds of points scattered all over the world. Each point gives access to a thought about queerness: the place of the first homosexual kiss, the place of a transphobic altercation, the territory where a person realized they were queer. A touching and eloquent work.
After an hour, you come out of the Phi Center feeling a bit entertained and having learned almost nothing. Oh, and we completely forgot to chat again with MAX, the non-binary robot. Damage !