Boobservation

Signals Are Sent. Meaning Is Negotiated.

Humans and animals communicate with each other not only with words, and this is something that artificial beings can struggle to pick up on. There are a lot of signals that can be sent via the body, but we have chosen to focus on sexual signaling: the conscious or subconscious messages showing attraction and interest in another being.

Our installation explores sexual signals as a complex, collaborative act rooted in instincts, interpretation, and mutual understanding. By using human breasts, we have isolated this quality and separated it from the rest of the body.

Transmitting

The breasts act firstly as an attention-grabbing stimulus for the audience, and secondly as symbol of our chosen creatureness. The purpose of this one body part is to translate affirmative and negative sexual cues through Morse code: binary pulses of presence and absence, openness and withdrawal.

Decoding

As participants adventure into decoding the messages of the installation, they experience signals being communicated with them. However, might these messages actually be conflicting with each other? Does the creature on one hand say yes, but at the same time no?

As sexual signaling is a cooperative ritual, the burden lies on the observer/decoder. Depending on the choice they make, the message understood will differ. It is the observer choosing which message they choose to see.

The World of Breasts

Breasts are complex elements of life that can be found simultaneously in biological, social, and symbolic contexts. They are immediately eye-catching, objects of fascination and desire, yet also burdened with controversy. As breasts are openly fantasised about in an almost worshipping way, people also shy away from acknowledging them directly. This contradiction creates desire driven by social prohibition, as the act of restriction heightens attention, curiosity, and longing. The installation was brought to life by our desire to bring this feeling to light for our viewers, for them to experience and conquer this feeling first-hand.

The conceptual foundation stems from 2 intersecting directions. First is care, protection and survival. One of the main biological functions of breasts is nourishment, keeping the younglings safe and alive. From this concept, our minds wandered towards breasts as vessels of care, dependancy and survival.The second line of thought stemmed from rituals, specifically death rituals such as burials. Death rituals are not limited to humans, as numerous creatures such as crows, elephants and other animals perform death rituals. To tie the 2 thoughts together, we decided to invert this focus, turning towards rituals of life: attraction, reproduction and connection. Mating rituals appear across different spieces, from birds, crabs, snails and humans, and are characterised by signaling and decoding.

Grounded in these ideas, the noisy eye-catching breasts powered by solenoids act as signals of sexual messages. Through Morse code, as one breast invites and the other repells, the installation becomes a field of contradiction and misunderstanding, making desire and refusal coexist. The use of Morse code was carefully chosen, as decoding this complex code made of pauses and signals (which can be easily misinterpreted) is equally demanding as reading and truly understanding sexual signals. Combining the concepts of forbidden fruit, care, ritual and coded communication, the work frames the breasts as a complex element that needs attention and care to be truly understood.

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