The Elastic Self addresses a range of intransigent questions apropos of human sexuality in the digital age utilizing the Fembot, or sentient female sex-robot, as its core motif. Two mediums are employed to this purpose: the first is a poetic video-collage installation chiefly concerned with provocation and libidinal affect, projection mapped upon a textile sculpture — an “Eldritch pussy” — entitled A Loving Woman. The second a print manifesto-zine, more explicitly didactic, furnishing the installation exhibit with authorial context. Altogether, The Elastic Self is an autotheoretical and autoethnographic exploration of how desire is articulated into sex, what constitutes good sex, and what good sex is politically good for with a resolutely queer pro-perversion position. Collaging theory, film, and pornography with personal reflections in a process the VNS Matrix’s Bitch Mutant Manifesto calls “textual plunderphonics” (or patchwork referencing) it transgresses the cyberfeminist canon, broadening its scope to include texts on desire, deviancy, and decay. It proposes an imagined world where a fembot is placed in a dynamic with a fellow fembot instead of an owner, a hybridized system I call the Folkbot, where power imbalances are thus restored, where each party in a network is coded to prioritize the pleasure of the other.

Keywords: new media, installation art, trans-poetics, post-humanism, new materialism, cyberfeminism, queer theory, critical hedonism.