Below, is the current transcript of audio I’ve recorded and snippets of conversations I’ve remembered. This monologue is what I plan to edit and turn into the ferocious, speedy dialogue for the Latex Maid to squeal. This monologue is at the centre of the piece, creating, what will be the amalgamation of one hundred interactions, emotions and personalities.
A bending guitar, jerking out a buzzing squeal followed by a warm humming drone, Dylan Walker is rocking back and forth, weight on heels, then on toes, gently twisting the knob of a pedal. He’s holding a microphone in hand with the wire wrapped around his fist like he’s getting ready to box an opponent. The floor is quivering from the sub. A gentle nod to the drummer (Dave Bland) then a discharge of blast beats, shrieking, jumping, sweating, grabbing arms and shoulders, throwing beer and bodies – the butterfly feeling in my stomach began to feel satisfied, I love these moments and I love where the music and the people take me.
I thought a lot about this energy the few days following, I thought about how it could be captured and used in the most justifying way possible for a gallery piece. The latex maid is an amalgamation of my closest friends, people I don’t like, people in passing, capturing whatever I found affective no matter how unenduring, insufferable or moving. The piece has deep roots in social perception and the anxiety surrounding it, creating a very real person with all their worried, brash charisma in tow.
I found myself plucking small pieces of personality from the people at the Full of Hell show. Sharing beer and nips of vodka smuggled into Electric Brixton with strangers, listening to their political worries and wobbly opinions – I felt trusted for no reason other than our shared love for grindcore and powerviolence tethering us together. I feel so inspired by these small, some would say, insignificant interactions. I felt belonging and trust.
After the show, I started to feel a lot of emotional attachment to the Latex Maid. Originally, I planned for her to be teeming with irony – a salty inside joke I could play on my friends but after I begun to hyper focus on these interactions, the people around me and the people included, I feel like it is becoming more connective. The emotions of the people recorded are delicate, regardless of their sincerity or my own opinion.
Although the humour isn’t lost with the Latex Maid, I have begun to abandon the fearlessness of its old sinister irony for creating a person more living and complex.
The Latex Maid, is a dental mannequin, drilled into a chair with an unhinged jaw, the jaw is then controlled by a linear motion actuator connected to Arduino Uno Rev 3, Sparkfun Spectrum Shield DEV-13116, Motor Driver, breadboard and laptop. This set up enables the actuator to move as it responds to sound – activating the jaw and enabling the Latex Maid to speak. I plan to surround the Latex Maid with empty beer cans, red leather boots, the laptop, a cross dressing mask and porn magazines.
After ringing multiple medical universities in search of a dental mannequin, I was able to source two from the Queens University nursing school in Belfast. One more full head was unusable as the teeth were immoveable inside the mannequin, although the other one was perfect as it had all the elements, I needed to fit an actuator to the teeth and move them. I then began looking into what actuator would be appropriate in order to make the teeth move. I wanted an actuator that displayed movement like that of a sex toy, this was important to me as one like this felt complimentary to the themes and personality of the project. I decided on an 1000 rpm actuator, with the pistons exposed, for about forty pounds.
As of this blog post, I’m still currently working with the hardware and coding element of the project to get the actuator to move the teeth concurrently with the monologue. I expect some elements / hardware to change as I continue to experiment with the piece to get it to a perfect place. I’m working with my coding wizard house mate to write the code. I’ve found this element of the project really challenging as I’ve never done anything like this. I’ve been really enjoying being a step out of my depth and learning.
(TW, Possible animal abuse)
Through struggling with the feelings of guilt for the Latex Maid, I became very interested in art that rubs up against the threshold of the morality of art. This led me to the work of Sun Yuan and Peng Yu. I found one piece particularly challenging – Dogs That Cannot Touch Each Other, 2003
“Dogs That Cannot Touch Each Other” combines installation, behaviour and interaction. They chose a mixture eight, trained to be, highly ferocious, pit bulls and rottweilers and put them on a specially made treadmill. The dogs are split into groups, both sides of the room are lined with four treadmills, the treadmills are pushed together just enough so that the dogs on either end are about a foot from each other’s snouts. The dogs are constrained by a brace which holds them as they bolt at one another, yelping and barking, some dogs more furious than the others. These dogs have an incredible present antipathy for one another. One which is obviously denied.
CBW talks about the piece –
“In today’s highly competitive world, have we been manipulated by those in power to become blind, belligerent fighting dogs in the workplace, chasing our imaginary enemies all day long until we are not breathing? Meanwhile in the age of Internet, when people are confronted with controversy, we fail to communicate at all but quickly split into two extremes—left or right, unification or independence, conservative or liberal—screaming and going at each other’s throats without coming close to any consensus!”
I felt moved by this piece, but not in a meaningful way. I don’t feel like it has much to say and what is being said feels shallow and only there to prop up controversy and a hollow spectacle. Sharing this piece with friends a thought always seemed to crop up. Maybe the piece is supposed to make you think of the threshold of morality in art. Is the cruelty of art like this worth forcing people to think about the problem? Is it worth using to spread information about dog abuse in China, or the basic take that political extremes are bad? I don’t think so. I can’t find the sense in it. I think it’s hollow and edgy. The response to this piece is usually just one that upsets people, no one ends up thinking about the political or social implications, they just want to turn it off and do something else. It feels weak and boring.
I enjoy thinking about the moral threshold in art and the limits people wish to push it. I think it can be incredibly useful to help compliment a message. This piece made me feel like I had to handle the content of the Latex Maid responsibly and in a way so that it isn’t hollow or just a piece of spectacle. I think this kind of care humanises the piece.
In complete darkness a mouth materialises to pour an epiphany, a buzzing in the head, to feel no pain or pleasure, confusion and acceptance for the reasonless decisions to punish by God.
“stand up woman … speak up woman … stood there staring into space … mouth half open as usual … waiting to be led away … glad of the hand on her arm … now this … something she had to tell … could that be it? … something that would tell … how it was … how she … what? … had been? … yes … something that would tell how it had been … how she had lived … lived on and on … guilty or not … on and on …”
“Not I” (Samuel Beckett)
Working with a dental mannequin was the initial idea for Latex Maid. I’m fascinated by medical equipment, how it works, and its total intimacy with strangers. These objects have a lot to say with prestige in every society. I loved these ideas and how well they complement what the Latex Maid wants to communicate.
I called two medical universities, desperate to get through to a department which would let me buy a mannequin. I eventually got through to the department of nursing for Queen University in Belfast. The conversation was awkward, but they put me in contact with their medical equipment supervisor who was willing to send me two heads from Ireland. A week later they arrived at my house in London. I thought the aesthetic similarities to the mouth in “Not I” was uncanny. I was excited.
I felt very connected to the themes of reasonlessness, torment and jumbled thought in “Not I” I wanted to twist and use these ideas and see how they work in my own life. This is when I came up with the plan to build a personality using the thoughts and opinions of the people around me. I would record the things people would say that would affect me, I would write peoples DJ mixes, things that made me laugh, people they disliked, events they thought were okay. I felt guilty at first even though they knew.
I started feeling like all these small, sometimes mundane statements had a lot to do with how you’re perceived, why people like or dislike you. The Latex Maid turned into something with a profound anxiety, it is someone who is as sinister and malicious as they are sweet and trustworthy.
