Feeling a Future Coming

Abstract

Feeling a Future Coming is a multimedia art installation that considers the potential of friendship, offering a pointed critique of institutions and our consumption of their products. The installation is a social experiment that breaks through the isolation we all feel. The artworks I discuss in this thesis weave together theories of the glitch, emergence, the abject, the erotic, and others. My analysis foregrounds the postcapitalist mobilizing potential that the artworks activate between these discourses.

Feeling a Future Coming values critical connections over critical mass, applying force on strategic pressure points that form the boundaries of typical friendships. I incorporate abject materials like menstrual blood, semen, and squirting to challenge the social and cultural taboos that attempt to constrain our friendships. By inviting participation in the creation of the artworks, I ask myself and my friends to step out of our isolation and to encounter one another anew. This act brings a momentary embodiment of liberation as I re-imagine what is possible.