Perversion

"Instead of going directly from one point to another, the electron goes along for a while and suddenly emits a photon; then (horrors!) it absorbs its own photon. Perhaps there's something 'immoral' about that, but the electron does it!"

Richard Feynman, cited in Karen Barad, On Touching: The Inhuman That Therefore I Am

Perversion is a suspended sculpture that functions as a capacitive sensor: a large sheet of handmade paper (gold-gilded on one face, embedded with graphite). The conductive gold surface registers the electrical field of anyone that approaches it. Proximity, distance, and touch are read continuously and drive the sound in the room. The work begins responding before contact occurs: a hand at a distance alters the field; a hand at that reaches closer alters it more; a hand on the surface alters it completely. The threshold between not-touching and touching is a gradient the sculpture continuously reads.

The paper is made from discarded things that carry memories of perverse self-touch: a health insurance background check containing false claims about a woman’s body, an erotic confession addressed to a woman’s worst self, an unfinished chapter of an unpublished erotic novel, old underwear, fertile soil, and a cigarette pack with used butts that fell into the pulp while it dried outdoors (an accident the material seemed to author, since the insurance file had already declared the artist a smoker). These were shredded, soaked, and beaten until the words dissolved and the fibres released each other. What was legible became matter. The record persists as texture, weight, and the faint violet bleed still visible at the edges.

Sound is emitted toward the sculpture from surrounding speakers. The paper receives it through a microphone that returns it to the signal chain, closing a loop between what is transmitted and what is heard.

Barad, reading Feynman, describes the electron emitting a photon and then absorbing it: a self-interaction that quantum field theory cannot subtract away, and which Feynman found faintly immoral. Barad names it the perversion at the heart of matter; the fact that nothing is separate enough from itself to be simple, that self-touching is always an encounter with the strangeness inside the self. She also insists that touch is never contact. What we experience as touching is electron clouds repelling each other across a gap that never closes: the other felt as force before it is felt as flesh, proximity already registering as pressure.

Perversion makes this literal. The capacitive field is touch-at-a-distance, measured and made audible. Approach the work and you are already inside its sensing.