mecha mecha mecha is a livestreamed performance-lecture and participatory nail reading that explores the networked and disembodied self through the persona of the "girl". Our interpretation of the "girl" is an ungendered model / AI that is stepped into while navigating digital spaces. In mecha mecha mecha's accessories, the performing body is prompted to both move and interact with the world in ways beyond the limitations that societal norms have shaped. We've equipped the hard shell of the fingertips with a soft armor. The ruffle on each nail is coiled and tightened up, but when undone using the drawstring, it reveals an embroidered excerpt from the text to be read out loud into the microphone. mecha mecha mecha livestreamed performance activates the text from every angle, recorded using multi-projection camera captures, amplified by the microphone and pitch shifts, and put into motion with our hands and voices.
This performance was conceived and executed in collaboration with Vinh Mai Nguyen as part of their thesis on the Cute and the Nail.
Girl dinner, hot girl walk, that girl, clean girl, girl boss, girl math, girl blog, hot girl summer, pick me girl, christian girl autumn, vsco girl, e-girl, good girl, bad girl, sad girl, manic pixie dream girl, i’m just a girl, girl’s girl, girl power, rat girl, feral girl, gorgeous gorgeous girls love soup, it girl, cam girl, for the girls, girl code, horse girl, gamer girl, girlypop, tomato girl, olive girl, red onion girl, girl next door, riot grrrl, gremlin girl, girl shopping, daddy’s girl, dream girl, babygirl, girl rot, girl blunt, fangirl, go piss girl, girl pretty, the girl reading this…
This project pulls from Girl theorist Alex Quicho’s use of the mecha as a metaphor for “climb[ing] into and pilot[ing] this already-existing subject that has the unique privilege of being greater than us all, yet thoroughly downplayed and underestimated.” As Quicho writes in Everyone is a Girl Online, “It may well work in our favor to accelerate our way into Total Girl—that is, to consider the girl as a specific technology of subjectivity that maxes out on desire, attraction, replication, and cunning to achieve specific ends—and to use such technology to access something once unknowable about ourselves rather than for simple capital gains, blowing a kiss at individually-scaled pleasures while really giving voice to the egregore, the totality of not just information, but experience, affect, emotion.” Tracing homologies from the Girl to AI brings us to the upstream effects of Total Girl; a perfect model for AGI aspirants; the well-dressed singularity that retroactively writes itself into existence from the future one purchase at a time.