touching upon desire
laying your hands on It
tethering, caressing, throttling
horse flesh, what else is sensual?
Elemental and allegoric, a tepid allergic reaction

tactile memories, like a slab of cold meat, a spektor, a hissy fit

(PAUSE)

The machine is supple:
all silica beads and blue glowing with productivity. A plasticy epidermis. The voice projected overhead in the train, (and) the voice emanating from our smart phones is female. Streamlined, subservient, unobtrusive: the secretary or wife that cannot complain, nag, leave you. A smooth caressing voice, a lulling dulcet tone. Light weight aluminium, silky rubber encasement.

This is the ultimate form of emotional labour:
service with a smile, and not through gritted teeth this time around, thank you very much.

The following is a series of excerpts from a reading given at the 2018 NEON digital arts festival 2018 symposium, which took place on the 9th of November at the V&A Dundee.

(PAUSE)

Performed docility
angelic,
giggling,
humble.
crows feet crocodile tears
a real piece of work

A machine that can clean up after itself: erasure, neatly. Wiping up behind yourself, after every step, there is no history here only polished parquet flooring, gleaming under strip lighting. An ugly smear eradicated, exfoliated right from your pores. Cleanliness and the antichrist in one body: murmuring to each other, simpering flirtatiously.

(I am thinking about counter balances and Polar Opposites. I am thinking about the measurements of justice and lead weights and dead weights.)
Needy magnetic fields, an urge from your atoms like a gut feeling or fate or déjà vu. Undeniable and felt, like my presence or the memory of my presence – which leads to the question, how much desire is required to conjure physical mass, to give weight and texture and breath to that desire? To make that palatable phantom into meat? How can we measure desire, what devices could be employed? Let me sink my weary fingers between your pallid ribs, beyond your fleshy border. It cannot be done. Short circuit.

(PAUSE)

Please contact me for a PDF version of the full text at caitlynmain@gmail.com

I swallow the foreign entity and it wraps itself in my oesophagus and strangles me from within an alcove of my coarse throat. Gulping, chewing over, worrisome things which reside in the spaces between your teeth and rot them slowly. SD cards and sleek USB sticks, instruments of memory devised from plastic or metal – hunks of light coloured calcium, slotted into wet pink gums, or inserted into the ports on my laptop.
There are substances and forms of consumption which are difficult, cloying, causing my slack jaw to ache, and there are forms and substances that appease my palette and slither down my gullet pleasingly. I easily digest the view of the soft creases of your face, illuminated by the incandescent light from your phone: I swallow it whole, greedily. The rolling passage of a feed beneath my thumb soothes my stomach, eases my nausea: a type of visual drip feed, an ocular IV. There are all different types of sustenance. Force-feeding has the stoic and irrefutable reputation for violence.