Women are taught, very early, that desire is something that happens to us, not something we generate. We are expected to be the stage, not the actor; the landscape, not the storm. Art history prefers women as allegories of desire, never as its engineers.
Yet the truth is far more interesting:
women are machines of desire — intricate, volatile, recursive, sovereign.
Not machines in the patriarchal sense (cold, efficient, programmable), but machines in the mythological sense: creations of circuitry and intuition, marked by pleasure, instinct, history, trauma, power, metamorphosis. Machines that rewrite themselves.
For years I sensed this intuitively while writing, while constructing performance personas, while building erotic visual archives that slipped between seduction and subversion. But it was only later — through digital art, feminist theory, and the disobedient erotics of punk — that the idea matured into a framework: the erotic machine as feminist methodology.
The erotic machine is not a literal device.
It is an aesthetic principle.
A philosophical engine.
A refusal to let desire be domesticated.
Patriarchal cultures treat female desire as either dangerous or decorative. A thing to suppress or a thing to sell. Both outcomes remove agency. But when the erotic is reclaimed by the woman herself — as creator, curator, and conductor — it becomes a form of intellectual and political power.
Audre Lorde wrote that the erotic is a source of deep knowledge.
Punk taught me that the erotic is also a source of havoc.
Digital art shows me that the erotic is programmable, glitchable, corruptible — and therefore hackable.
In my creative practice, the erotic machine appears in many shapes:
1. The erotic as glitch
When I distort digital images — bodies multiplied, colours bleeding, textures corrupted — desire becomes unruly. It escapes categorisation. It refuses the tidy erotics of commercial culture. A body that glitches cannot be easily consumed.
2. The erotic as persona
Pasha du Valentine and the Countess both emerged from erotic excess. These personas allowed desire to become theatrical, intellectual, excessive, and critical. They were not objects of desire; they were agents manufacturing desire as a political gesture.
3. The erotic as archive
Erotic art history has always been political. But feminist erotic archives do something additional: they reclaim pleasure as authorship. They reframe sexuality as knowledge, not as spectacle.
4. The erotic as refusal
Desire that refuses to perform according to patriarchal scripts becomes inherently radical. When women depict desire in ways that are messy, strange, self-focused, or unprofitable, they disrupt the entire economic infrastructure of femininity.
The erotic machine is not cute.
It does not coo.
It does not whisper.
It hums.
It overheats.
It buzzes like a wasp trapped behind a mirror.
It is a structure of agency: a self-assembled mechanism capable of generating meaning and pleasure without permission. And like all machines, it can malfunction — but in feminist art, malfunction is productive. Error becomes language. Overload becomes revelation. Noise becomes a kind of orgasmic theory.
What excites me most is that the erotic machine is incompatible with patriarchy. Patriarchy depends on the illusion that women cannot author their own desire. Once that illusion collapses, the whole architecture rattles. Feminist erotic art rattles it deliberately.
Sometimes gently.
Sometimes violently.
Sometimes with a sly grin.
Sometimes with a glitched pixel that refuses to be smoothed.
My relationship with the erotic is as much intellectual as it is visceral. It is a lens, a toolkit, a source of research. It influences the way I film bodies, paint textures, write fiction, design personas, and craft moving-image works that hover between seduction and critique.
To work with the erotic as a feminist artist is not to be provocative for its own sake.
It is to reclaim the circuitry of feeling.
To reprogram the software of the gaze.
To design your own architecture of pleasure.
The erotic machine is not a fantasy of futurism.
It is already here.
It is the woman who writes her own desire into being, again and again, in every medium available.
And once activated, it cannot be shut down.
