please be tender with my data by Kat Zavada
The story began with a missing file. The metaverse awakening, triggered by Facebook’s rebranding to Meta, felt like the right moment to recall “Body Open Source” – Eternal Engine’s VR work from 2018 – and to queer the metaverse again. Annoyingly, the file, whose source code was backed up to the cloud four years ago, turned out to be corrupted. The frantic hard drive search, the nervous tightness in the chest, the feeling of emptiness when it’s gone: File not found. Sound familiar?
Emotional, intimate, or even sexual relation to data comes from its fragility. Humans are data beings in the Information Age; any attempt to separate the digital from the non-digital is futile. “Please be tender with my data,” pleads the avatar from the exhibition’s titular work. The non-binary guardian – rendered in violet hues – emerges on luminous fabric hung in the exhibition centre: a fighter struggling with the country’s oppressive politics, a queer being escaping from the cisheteronorm of the Real to the utopias of the Virtual. Is any space safe? Anxieties around the intimate human relationship with data translate in our language. Data leaks are akin to losing vital, precious fluids that inform our identity. Surveillance threatens autonomy, and cyber attack, like a stroke, strikes the sensitive structures of our digital nervous system.
The act of reclaiming power over the digital body can manifest in many ways. These can be as radical as the quantified-self movement, whose followers obsessively measure their body parameters to achieve a soothing sense of control. In return, they expose the one of most sensitive of their data – heart rate, body weight and sleep duration. Online voyeuristic practices fuel social media platforms – for some, they can be a turn-on, as long as the voir knows about the voyeur. Security freaks worry about undesirable, nonconsensual use of their data as much as they fear burglaries or sexual assaults. While data generates visibility, data gaps lead to biases against gender, racial, and sexual identities. The consequences of it are felt by underrepresented and marginalised groups.
What can we then do to regain control of our digital bodies? The artist duo Eternal Engine shows us a tender yet radical way to do so – by subverting technology with queer practices that use sexuality as a weapon and the body as a cognitive apparatus. Their artistic strategies derive from non-hetonormative experience and the struggles that manifest in creating one’s own, decentralised worlds. The queer urge to be autonomous is embodied here in an independent server – a matrix with an oval-shaped, uncanny, BDSM-like form which you plug into. Inside, the dream of free, nonbinary sex awaits you – created on a binary computer, with the acceptance of its technological and semantic primitivism. The dream of a spiritual act of pleasure that escapes the limitations of what is masculine and what is feminine is achieved.
And the file was found.
