Strange Attractors – The Book and DVD
In collaboration with Encyclopedia Destructica, The Institute for Extraterrestrial Sexuality commemorates Kepler’s (kepler.nasa.gov) voyage into deep space on a quest for earthlike planets with a book of visual art and writing that envisions the erotic lives of beings that may some day be encountered (if not in outer space than at least in our dreams). Included with the book is a DVD of video and animation exploring the same themes.
This project moves beyond male and female, beyond queer, beyond any notions of gender, beyond the anthropomorphic to erotic possibilities as vastly varied as the universe itself. What kinds of sentient beings, what types of sexualities, how many erogenous zones and types of erotic pleasure exist out there in the cosmos?
While science fiction literature and film has often touched on alien sexuality, these encounters are frequently represented as between a human and a humanoid alien. Gender is almost always portrayed as binary even when it is homosexual. Sexual encounters consist primarily of engagements between two beings. There is usually something like a penis and something like a vagina or anus. Everything is primarily based on human sexuality. Much of it is not very imaginative, visionary or subversive (although some of it is, even when humans are involved).
What if instead, for example, we envisioned a sentient being that resembled a giant Slug covered with erogenous pustules. In its voracious wanderings it encounters and courts a being that is something like sentient phosphorescent Slime Mold. This Slime Mold creature possesses low charge electronic pulses that are able to tingle the Slug like being pleasurably to the point of ecstatic release. During this release the erogenous pustules secrete a flood of phosphorescent multicolored psychedelic fluid that dissolves the Slime Mold into something delicious for the Slug to eat. Less dangerously, the fluid could temporarily dampen the Slime Mold’s electrical charge and bathe it in blissful ambrosia.
We have invited artists and writers to create representations that can expand our conception about the possibilities of alien life-forms and of the nature of erotic pleasure. Isabella Rossellini’s hilarious Green Porno (www.sundancechannel.com/greenporno/), which looks at the unusual sexuality of insects (and more recently sea creatures) begins to suggest how limited our view of even intra-planetary sexuality is.
We are for an imaginary erotics and sexuality that is polymorphous, perverse, that imagines hundreds, thousands, millions of possible genitalia and erogenous zones. That envisions creatures great and small that can pleasure one another intra- and extra-species.
