FILM

FILM EROTIC PROXIMITY

3. June 2021

Gao Chang

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Dr. Chang Gao_Erotic Proximity_Film, Royal College of Art, London 2022

The film Erotic Proximity presented a series of actions interacting between the hands and fruits, actions such as inserting, spreading, dripping, circling, squeezing, dipping, rubbing, gentle edging, squatting, honey flowing to present the multiple actions associated during sex. Liquid material like honey, milk, and yogurt, to symbolize the body liquid like sweats, sperm, ejaculation, and pleasure. The supernormal stimuli aspects of feelings have been activated by the hyper-sharpen and sensational image of the multi-media and actions such pouring milk and water, dripping honey, juice and stirring alcohol onto multiple fruits and vegetables as well as flying and hitting strawberries onto milk or honey. While the erotic aspects feelings such as eroticism, affection and love, playfulness, pleasure, phantasy/imagination, caring and tenderness have all been expressed through the different layers of imagery actions of touching and flowing between fingers and the fruits.

This movie is using the content of beautiful hand, beautiful gestures to subversively reflect the cliché of advertisement commodity. The movie itself is just playing with different registers derived from the consumerism culture and meant to use AR interface subversively presented it in a hyper commercialized public space like Victoria Station in London. My voice with the speaking very calmly and confiding tone synchronized with the content shown on the screen. This work also questions George Battelle’s sense of eroticism, who regards women as passive and taboo object from the male patriarchal perspective, which is completely contradictory from the female eroticism I am pursuing. At the meantime, the difference between its original sound of food and artificial sound generated from other materials, challenge our conditioned perception which is shaped by the commercial and film industry. As the film below, with ASMR (Autonomous Sensory Meridian Response) and binaural sound effect.

About the Artist

Dr. CHANG GAO

Berlin-based multimedia artist and postdoctoral researcher working across artificial intelligence, bioelectric sensing, sculpture, film, augmented reality, and real-time generative systems. She is an Associate Researcher with the Intervening Arts Collaborative Research Center (SFB) at Freie Universität Berlin and holds a PhD from the Royal College of Art (London). Gao is also a board member and communications director of the feminist collective art&dialogue (Berlin), as well as the founder and director of the Social Innovation Research Lab at the Central Academy of Fine Arts (China).

Gao’s artistic and theoretical practice investigates affect, desire, and wonder as epistemic forces that challenge cultural hierarchies, anthropocentric AI bias, and regimes of technopolitical control. Her research explores how affective computing, sensory systems, and bioresponsive technologies reshape perception, agency, identity, and social structures. Working across robotics, augmented reality, bioelectric systems, sculpture, real-time AI installations, film, and immersive time-based media, Gao integrates eroticism and bodily affect as critical tools to destabilize normative boundaries between human and non-human intelligence. By harnessing desire and embodied sensation as subversive forces, Gao’s work confronts structures of censorship and exposes the ideological biases embedded within contemporary technological systems. Her projects seek to unsettle dominant imaginaries of control and efficiency, instead foregrounding vulnerability, intimacy, and affective resonance as sites of knowledge production and political imagination. Her work has been exhibited internationally in Berlin, London, Seoul, Utrecht, Graz, Tokyo, Helsinki, and across China.