“In the Playhouse” is a two-part project in progress. [1] it is a (durational) performance, and [2] it is a public art installation. (mixed media, 2024)

Drawing from Paul Preciado’s “Pornotopia: An Essay on Playboy’s Architecture and Biopolitics”, we credit Playboy magazine in having a formative influence on some current discourses around body and identity. Playboy magazine is not only a massive contributor to the rise of modern architecture and modernist design post WWII but also reinvented patriarchy and masculinity. While traditional narrative of masculinity positions a man outdoors, dirty, in battle or physical making, playboy designed indoor masculinity through architecture: a room on his own, the modernist pent/play/house for the urban bachelor. Women don’t live there, they come for playdates. In the playhouse, true love is possible only between men, while sexuality is performed with bunnies. Playboys use high tech to make things, and to organize everyday life, resulting in the playboy bunny providing the parameters of what a female robot should look like, sound like, and act like. Cyborgians perform the domestic services assigned to the female body in marriage. AI therefore is based on the playboy fantasy of a masculinity (always an individual) in opposition to the bunnies (always plural). In this matrix, the playboy bunny blurs the boundaries between humanity and animal kingdom, as well we humanity and technology to a point where human and artificial intelligence are becoming more and more similar – a total media conversion under the paradigm of white male supremacy. This “total media conversion has led to a new integral culture and created a crisis of identity, a vacuum of the self, which generates tremendous violence—violence that is simply an identity quest, private or corporate, social, or commercial” (McLuhan). Our performance–in fact any performance–thus is an identity quest. It is the performers search for roles (identities) that shall create actions, not the goals.

[1] The Performance

In March 1969, the Canadian media theorist Marshall McLuhan gave an interview to Playboy magazine at his house near Toronto with his wife and four of his five children present. In a first iteration in June/July 2023, we met as a group of seven collaborators for a week-long retreat to explore the material and to attempt a free form reenactment of the interview in which the performers occupy rotating characters: Eric Norden, the playboy interviewer, Marshall McLuhan, and his wife Corinne. At the same time, the group itself served as an object of investigation and introspection touching upon topics like body modification, diets, male dominances, artists and privilege, co-creation and competition, as well as collaboration and intimacy. We filmed everything, and shared some material in a public rehearsal, inviting the audience to become part of playhouse universe.

For the next iteration of the performance, audience members can also participate by connecting their phones as TV cameras to my computer, and film the show from their perspective, and with their sensitivity. All cameras will be live-streamed.

[2] The public art installation is a four-channel video projection based on the performances. The video channels are like communicating vessels connected. Each channel is in dialogue with other channels.

In channel 1 the players do several loops of the interview re-enactments.

In channel 2 the players respond with video/performances to Marshall McLuhan.

In channel 3 all composite videos (green screen/ VFX) are deconstructed.

In channel 4 the players share memories of their week-long experience.