桃色婴儿油

peach baby oil starts with a kind of persecutory delusion. Are all the juxtaposed what-ifs the same? The anxiety of growing and enlargement takes form in the immediate and mixed crises, quotidian and non-quotidian: the traffic light turning red; a building collapses. The overgrown alligator in the single apartment. All these are singularities/events however, if most egalitarian mediated over the screen - manifested as images consumable, images filterable by a body (which would be most simply ours, qua Mark Hansen). What is the electronic image other than pure effects of light? Put differently: can we locate the electronic effect that can be called image elsewhere than a bodily process of reception which is also a production?

Sometimes the anxiety of overgrowing takes place over the screen space, analogous to the window when the image of the female body first occur - it occurs emerging out of a threshold, an interface. On one hand, this is a metaphor for electronic vision as something taking place on a surface. On the other hand, it exposes a crisis, of the danger of non-containable image: of electronicality itself turned into flesh, concretising and abstracting into an object of erotic and libido relations. Can you have sex with a tv? This is a dangerous task - a life-consuming ludity, in David Cronenberg’s Videodrome (1983). This effect across the screen is also more obviously displayed in such as Saeki Hiromi’s The Place that is not Necessarily Wrong with its plays around the television screen that generates inconsistency across realities - a plastic interface of containment, an electricalised image of plastic containment, a hollow (the “ku” mentioned in the title as not a place but emptiness) where physical objects can pass - which ended with the experimental object’s collapse in the end. These also link to another feminist, Idemitsu Mako’s earlier video works in the 1980s, most notably Kiyoko’s situation (1989), where tv screens of universal presence, duplicated non-duplication, embarks a mental crisis of desperation — the invasion/malfunctioning(暴走) of the electronic signal, the crack-down of the daily life and normative information reception.

The conjunction of peach-colour and baby oil happen explicitly at this moment, portrayed as an unambiguous crisis. What if the signal-image emerge, enlarges beyond the child, the effect of a man (and more importantly, a woman), into real objects and bodies, expending into an inverted space that one becomes faced-off (qua Ling Hong Lam): There is no longer a privileged agent in information perception as we are elevated from the “singular form of embodiment” (Hansen again) to confront from a higher dimension the almost theatrical mixture of the electronic image and the corporal. But the figural/metaphorical language of dimentionality is also problematic; for there is no longer an additional layer, another exterior — but an interior that is concurrently exterior, no more a room filtered through a screen (in sense of a general phenomenology, a Being mediated). There is no in-betweenness because there is no agents nor objects on its ends; there is pure communication, a communicataional reality, where secrets were never revealed nor touched become suspended in the messages-digital signals. This is exactly what happened towards the end of Wada’s work, where the monologue is transmuted by touching, one child transmuted by two women. And none of these is hermenutic. Just proliferation (getting bigger, bigger, bigger…). This non-information becomes her “first lease violation” - the criminal of mind, the criminal of body; the pink-colour of mind, the pink-colour of body - the anomaly of thought that disturbs their operation yet retaining their dimensional distance. The real is never contained in a flattened apparatus of filter-information (or body-image or even brain-screen) apparatus — “the brain is the screen” aphorism of Deleuze — but always threatens to escape and flee into a further dimension, a further moment of distill, where embodiment in the previous situation (the image filtering through body) turns into consumable objects (the image-bodies making love).

In the end, unlike the unavoidble doom after the electronic image crisis - death, madness, collapse - Wada’s protagonists left the room — The room that is also a non-space, a mise-en-scene locus of face-off, transformed through image/body and image-bodies — transgressing the interface of dialectics/heumenutics/phenomenology/moral/law. No one has to die. We are all criminals.