Specifications: 4hr duration, 40 participants
QUEER CRIP LOVE ISLAND DREAM MACHINES
Inspired by collective research done for Normal Study Group: Objectification (2025) and Fen Rose’s Queer Crip Love Island poem. Through a series of somatic sequences and guided experiments, this piece invites participants to build machines of their dreams out of their own bodies. Later, the group is divided into two, so that one half can cruise the live art machines while the other half performs them.
The work foregrounds the pharmacopornographic era’s treatment of bodies as machines, with constant pressures of productivity, optimisation and self-regulation. It explores the tension between how bad living human bodies are at becoming objects and machines (our joints ache, we sneeze, get tired, change our minds, overflow with emotions) and also how well we are trained from early age to endure, dissociate, and please.
In the war on imagination, QUEER CRIP LOVE ISLAND DREAM MACHINES is an exercise in visionary world-building by means of inventing alternative machines and technologies to define our selves, our past, present and future. It is concerned with conditions for collaboration and play that negotiate the erotics of objectification through a Disability Justice lens.
Recent installments:
2026 The Bath House, London (upcoming)
2026 Hex House, New York City
- + 2. + 3. + 5. Dream Machines concept art and poster (2025-2026);
4. QUEER CRIP LOVE ISLAND DREAM MACHINES at Hex House (2026).