you are (being)

“The war is based on a crass error,” Hugo Ball wrote in his diary on June 26, 1915. “Men have been mistaken for machines.”

You are a girl if I say so. You are a boy when I command it. Othered once a week, I’m in charge. We give this oppressive doctrine of gender too much power over our Being. What use is it to be in the world with such finite options? I don’t want to transition genders, I want to transcend them. I want it to mean nothing to me at all. A girl, a tree, a drum, a boy, a machine, a weapon, all the same. Your body and my body, car-accident-smashed into each other, pulled taut over the wreckage, see what we can do, all parts, all collateral. Become, unbecome. Just like that.

As Hugo Ball identified in 1915 while observing the first World War, men have been mistaken for machines. The very essence of a person has been distilled and optimized for violence, for mindless following, for control. Now we are over a century past the war that pushed men to Dadaism and we are still expected to be machines, called men. We are expected to accept sex at birth as a uniquely unchangeable feature, a serial number, that forces us to exist with the confines of one code. Inspired by Tzara and Ball’s need to deconstruct language and meaning behind art, I wanted to dismantle the idea that these gender determinations meant anything. Marcel Duchamp began to examine this as Rrose Sélavy, taking on a female alter ego, whose name stands for “eros, c’est la vie”. Duchamp-Sélavy gestures towards the inherent absurdity in gender roles and gender perception, shirking it on and off like a fur coat. In “you are (Being)”, I wanted to use chance operations to categorize gender. Using random number generation, I borrowed an attribute from iconic beings and made myself from amongst them. I invite you to do the same. You can become or unbecome whatever you like, boy, girl, other.

become, unbecome.

Dice 1

Dice 2

Dice 3