via whitney isp
new shit
ON LIBERATION : FANTASTIC MECHANISMS
For : Towards World-Building: Sciences at the End of the World
Panel at Refiguring the Future, NYC
Eyebeam x Refresh.Art
February 9th, 2019
CLICK HERE TO WATCH PANEL LIVESTREAM FOOTAGE
Exploring the settler ontologies that govern technoscientific inquiry, this panel will engage technology towards a liberatory, world-building politic.
w/ Rasheedah Phillips, Artist and Co-Creator of Black Quantum Futurism
Alexander G. Weheliye, Professor, Northwestern University
Maandeeq Mohamed, Writer (moderator)
_
I.
“I seek through pain, to achieve a higher level of consciousness, which is a Pleasure beyond the physical nature of mere pain. Through my infliction of pain on others, I assist in their liberation as I am also liberated. My connection with my partner under such circumstances is deeper and more totally real than any other experience two people can share. “
— From “Reflections on Sadomasochism and Race by “The Real Don Perry.”
Black Leather In Color. Volume 1, Number 3. Fall 1994.
BL FEMME ROPE BOTTOM PUP 4 NB/BW/L/WOC. 26. NYC.
LF other weird and busy girls to walk me. likes : consent, your dirty underwear, restriction. will bite at : time wasters and scaredy cats. needs regular discipline and rigorous training. play only.
ROPE TOP BW 4 ROPE BOTTOM BW. SERIOUS ONLY. 35. NYC.
What we’re not gonna do is front : LF series of conversations that don’t lead to dates or drinks. Seeking sub 4 discipline and denial. Must love order. Must text back. No sex (not ever.)
“It’s a match.”
II.
“Think of it as a labour which gives birth to a joint consciousness and connects two lives at the intersection of their spirits. This is a realness of feeling and emotion that approaches true ecstasy. This is the whole aim of SM, to enable mere mortal flesh to touch God. To create an authenticity of feeling and emotion that allows one to feel the living Spirit which resides in all things. The instruments of torture used to achieve this state are merely tools of a higher master.”
What aspect of fantasy isn’t a technology? In celebration of a blind faith in the inexplicable human desire to discover utopic connective methodologies, fantasy allows us access to a “poetic in-between;” a worship-like manifestation of a self-sensing copresence, unique to an individual, who, with themselves in solitude or tandem, experience a range of realtime emotions triggered by voluntary ritual performance or reading. These rituals then grant the individual(s) agency to feel a deep sense of proximity between body and spirit, making way for transformation and reflection with an very otherworldly copresence. The activation of this routine highlights the relationship between the emotional and sensing, uniting it with its physical container beyond the reach of any retelling. The feeling connection and its relationship with itself must be allowed to play and stretch within its container, to be celebrated, and to evolve through its unique performativity— to be given full access, read “liberation,” to the space of genuine euphoria. This is where it connects with its intellectual counterpart, the privilege of actively knowing knowing. It must be worked for. Once unlocked, it erects a layer of new privacies, freedoms, knowledges, and pleasures, dangers, and dogma to be meticulously organized. A continued harnessing of that access comes through rigorous rearranging of resources like time or heartspace and encourages a creativity through the call for the necessity to manufacture situations that maximize the occurrence of growth through structured recreation.
This fantastic mechanism allows us to live in folds of shared reality nestled in a private space sequestered for the control over the automation of euphoria. Here we find agency over self through interiority. Through inquiry and recreation, users of this technologies reject definitive systems of pleasure, healing, time, and embodiment. Especially important for the black, queer, and disabled identified, fantasy (read: worship) provides a route towards privacies and agencies that resist taxonomies historically organized by anglocentric educational, and medical (read :carceral) cultures, making room for the construction of interdependent ecologies that are able to better support their needs..
III.
“We are truly prisoners of the flesh, and in liberating ourselves of this imprisonment we find ourselves at One with the universe. Yet permanently leaving the earthly coil is not realistic. One path can achieve a similar state of grace via certain paths, under the tutelage of a knowledgeable Master, and realize the closest thing to Nirvana that mere mortals will ever achieve [...] These are not new fetishes somehow learned from white men. These practices have nothing to do with vestigial slave mentalities or low self-esteem. [...] If today I am a dominant top, it is because at one point in the past, I learned what it is like to be a bottom, and now I can pass on the lessons on life and strength of character, principals, moral values and sensitivity which define a whole noble lineage of [those] that began before my time and will end long after theirs.”
I was greeted first by the altars in her house, scattered, taking up space in all of its corners. Bags of candy, booze, beads, and candles lined each arrangement, placed with care alongside stacks of paper with words scrawled across them in languages I didn’t recognize.
“You can’t be naked in front of that one,” she said, as she touched my arm with one hand, making sure I heard her the first time, and pointed with the other.
She let go, replacing my arm in her hands with the handles of my bags and began making the four foot walk through the kitchen into the living area and disappeared. I caught my breath. I struggling to take my shoes off.
“We’ll do it in here.”
“Can I sit down?” I yelled through the curtain separating the two spaces.
“No.”
I waited there for a moment looking, wondering what it would be like to cross over in home where crossing over clearly had so many different meanings. How much openness was I willing to allow in a space of such unfamiliar worship?
I joined her in the next room; hanging on the walls were ropes and knives, artworks and calendars.
“Don’t sit anywhere,” she repeated, ”don’t talk, and don’t fuck with your underwear. Take everything else off and leave it on the floor next to you.”
I dropped my purse first. We really were here only to do what we had agreed now that all the words were out of the way.
I watched her silently from my place to the left of her bed, as she shuffled around covering some of the other alters with blankets. Finished, she grabbed the first rope off the wall and turned toward me. Pulling one string, the bundle collapsed; its length falling to the floor with a dull dry thud. She stood directly in front of me watching.
“What else do you need to be ready?” She asked.
I told her I was cold and then stumbled over the word water. Her hand grabbed the back of my neck and lead me to our starting position leaving the unbound hemp length heavy on my neck.
“Down, Girl. Stay.”
From my position on knees, I waited for her to return, wondering if this work would feel any different under a roof where these unfamiliar Gods lived. I had never met one. Could they see us? I closed my eyes and prepared to journey into a divine space of my own amidst the overwhelming evidence of the other. Slipping off into subspace, I lost my sense of being a biped and saw my own light.
THE CHAMBER SERIES @ MCA CHICAGO, 09 OCT 2018
TITLE : _.Scheduled(VariableRatio):secondary-conditioned-immediateReinforcement(s)-handlerSearch1_DrillAndPractice.exe
RUNTIME : 30m
COLD SYSTEMS SUMMARY :
*** BEGIN - 30:00:00?
a. (00:00:01) Video begins.
b. I walk in to my place on the floor. In the midst of my “things.”
c. I prepare myself, put my “things” on, become the dog.
d. (EST 10-15:00:00) Once I’m prepared, I sit and show myself.
f. I go sit by OBJ#1 (bowl, treat) and perform Response#1.
g. * I go sit by OBJ#2 (flogger) and perform Response#2.
(OBJ#1 will initiate a reaction that the audience will find undesirable to watch/allow me to endure although object #1 may seem “more desirable,” or kinder than the other. - OBJ#2 will initiate a calm, self soothing, “rest” response.)
h. I sit in middle of audience and attempt to draw someone out.
-. If no response, I repeat.
-. If still no response, I interact with audience more with familiar “dog-like” behaviors.
-. I'll have a clicker in my hand, if someone even goes near object, I will click it and give attention to that individual as reward.
-. Will work with individual until they understand what to do with either object.
i. (EST 21:00:00) ** Eventually someone will figure out the task I’ve desire to “train” them to do.
j. It is my goal to get them to use the flogger on me continuously until the performance ends.
Goal: 5-8m - a long time in flogger-time.
Corresponding response to be given in clicks with the clicker.
k. Performance will end when communication shifts and reinforcement is no longer given from either party.
END - 30:00:00?
*Accepted physical risk profile :
- Communication will be precarious. (Moderate to high risk.)
- Person may use OBJ#2 incorrectly on my body. (Moderate to high risk, but if it escalates, I’ll break scene.)
**Performative risk profile, assessment :
- Audience/person may not respond. (Low risk.)
- Audience may not understand my communication and experiment may fail or detour. (Moderate risk.)
Stills from tracking video :
IN RESIDENCE @ ACE HOTEL CHICAGO : ( - - - )
while in residence at @acehotelchicago on sunday, the 17th, i gave a private, invite-only performance of a work called (- - -). 💐
"(- - -), a performance using material from her forthcoming chapbook, Soldier, alongside selections of fiction, words from LGBTQ elders past, and impromptu interviews with those in attendance. this work is made specifically for this gathering and will not be performed again.
an artist book version of (- - -), in an edition of 30, will be available to the public exclusively between check in and check out. (- - -) features leather, pussy, rope bondage, love lost, and an experiment in stillness." ~ * ♡
pg. 8 of (- - -)
new mix "leash pressure.." on nts london
listen to "leash-pressure_escape-avoidance-training_or_pattern-recognition(Soldier's_Remix)" via nkisi's show on NTS radio, london.
<3
“suspended” : after porgy and bess after ernestine anderson and after me for whom the boat is now a plane and that mista she talkin to is a sista.
There’s a plane that’s leavin soon for New York.
Come with me, that’s where we belong, Sista.
I’m one of those people who cries on an airplane. I cry when I’m high and flying, no matter high high, no matter what direction I’m moving. A woman I love jokes sometimes that I’m a crybaby but she’s right. I ugly cry, too. It’s the sensation of the actual lifting; from the ground, one minute, to an impossible reality, the next. From knowing a baseline, one minute, to not being able to unfeel the absence it, the next.
You and I can live that high life in New York.
Come with me, there you can’t go wrong, Sista.
I’ve been thinking so much about what “fly” means- to be fly- to be fly-ing- for things themselves to sustain flight. It’s supposed to describe thing we might do when we’re in a particular kind of motion at a particular type of height, right? But if I’m at my peak, what is there above me? What comes after flying but falling and freezing?
I’ll buy me the swellest mansion, on upper 5th Ave.
And through Harlem, we’ll go struttin! We’ll go a-struttin!
And there’ll be nothin’ too good for you.
I say to fly is to be undeniable. That’s my fly. You’ve gotta move out of my way if I’m flying. You can’t unsee me if I speed past you. If I am flying a flag, you’re making a decision to cruise or look or not. If I’m in an aircraft even, there’s a pilot who is carrying me. In flight, we also divert others-- sometimes physically. Like, I know me and my lover, we fly. Once she sang to me as she sent me off.
I’ll dress me in silks and satins,
And the latest of Paris styles.
All the blues I’ll be forgettin, I'll be forgettin,
I won’t be frettin’, just nothing but smiles.
The dictionary has a whole host of definitions for this word. Some of my favorite are, “to be successful,” as in "that didn't fly around me,” or, “to assail suddenly and violently,” as in “to go or move quickly,” as in, "I flew at ‘em.” It’s somehow missing how we sometimes use fly to mean cool though. Something tells me that’s not a mistake.
Come along with me, that’s the place
Don't be a fool, come along, come along!
And what about those that are forced to fly? I think of the wartime flyboys. I think of my great grandmother. I think of escape routes to wherever.
There’s a plane that’s leavin’ soon for New York.
There’s always a risk
Come with me, that’s where we belong, Sista.
in suspension maybe.
That’s where we belong.
Listen on the Diamond Stingily Show : https://soundcloud.com/know_wave/the-diamond-stingily-show-live-from-moma-ps1-home-school-field-day-february-5th-2018
THE CHAMBER SERIES X UNBAG MAGAZINE @ PRINTED MATTER. 11 JAN 18.
DAUGHTER OF THE CAGE // FEB 25 @ BOYFRIENDS CHICAGO
"Daughter of the Cage" breaks binaries and complicates the understanding that power cannot be held from the inside. Instead, this exhibition presents power on a spectrum, represented by a gradient from black to white. These colors are not arbitrary. If power dynamics can be mapped through “grey areas,” the potential for binary inversion is always already possible from either end of the spectrum, from inside or outside of the cage.
Read More“castle_of_the_white_prince” or an_offer_i_couldnt_accept.mp4
sorry about your net art.png
fresh faces: all about shawné michaelain holloway
fresh faces: all about shawné michaelain holloway
this article originally ran in the september 2015 issue of avn magazine profiling yhivi, a “fresh face” of the 2015 pornscape ~ click here to see the original on pg 16.
hometown:
small town indiana | age: 25 | height: 5-foot-8 | weight: 130 pounds | eyes: blk | hair: blk
“i first spotted shawné (pronounced SHAW-NAY) at on ikea transport bus in finland where she made an impression wearing a one-piece print all over me dress with dead fish on it. she has changed that look for something more sophisticated : a print all over me dress with chopped off penises all over it, and she has matured in other ways, too... have a look: ”
how did you start with this?
i had absolutely no intention on being an artist. i wanted to be a lawyer and accidentally ended up here because i wanted to keep going to school and art school was the only thing i hadn’t tried.
what did you do before this?
i had a job working in a gym and a clothing store.
how many scenes have you done now?
hundreds. at least one a day. i don’t go a day without something. i’m always on camera.
what’s the best scene you’ve done so far?
that’s a hard one. well, the types of scenes i like to do are private and commissioned. the flirty kind you know someone looks at and feels special while they watch. to make those, i really try to take as much as i can inside of me and let everyone see.
the most dicks in you?
sometimes dicks. mostly, #feels.
who do you want to work with that you haven’t worked with yet?
recently, i’ve been wanting to work with jessica creepshow or kira noir. really, i want to work with all transgressive POC. i want to be loud and i want to shoot film. i don’t even give a fuck what’s on that film. i want to build archives of material and vomit it all over the internet. no rules but everything counts.
how is making videos different from what you thought?
i didn’t think i’d be so unsatisfied with the end product. when i’m done editing, i’m done enjoying it. hopefully others can benefit from its existence but for me, it’s time to move on. i guess that’s why i call myself a performance artist instead of a video artist.
what¹s the biggest misconception outsiders have of the adult industry?
that fine art can’t be apart of it.
what are your biggest turn-ons?
people and objects that respect my space and expose me to new understandings of culture.
(wait, also body fluid.)
describe your dream sexual scenario.
one in which i actually orgasm.
what’s the most valuable life lesson you’ve learned?
to work hard to make as much money as possible without forgetting to enjoy it and remain empathetic through the whole process. that enjoyment and empathy are inextricably linked.
how would you spend your last day on earth?
eating and stealing.
how would your best friends describe you?
probably difficult and stubborn but loyal and hardworking.
how do you spend your free time?
alone and on the computer playing with social media— does that still count as alone?
also, trying to discover new foods.
if you weren’t doing this, what would you like to be doing?
being a stay at home wife working on a novel.
do you have a long-range plan?
get my phd, own some property, fall in love.
shawné michaelain holloway represents herself and has never been represented by a gallery.
to see photos of shawné michaelain holloway, and other fresh faces, visit her on facebook.
define escalation (?) or what is a ride and how much are they selling it for (?) . mpeg
duration: 4m01s.
digital video.
in the wake of anguish, how do we extricate ourselves from obsession? externally supported interfaces like physical addiction, technological preoccupation, and romantic obsession are discussed in this video as part of a primal instinct to rebalance the self.
2016.