PPP Please WoW Me (2023)

PPP Please WoW Me (2023)
Mixed-media installation, extruded polyester urethane, resin, acrylic paint, neon light, variable dimensions.
Performance. 52 min.
Galleri Knipsu

Laundry creates wearable art and sculptures in VR. These digital works then become solid as 3D printed or CNC machined wearable sculptures and training gear, battle-ready instruments of war and music, as well as reliefs for interactive video performance. In “PPP Please Wow Me”, the individual potential of all the objects are harnessed to work as conceptually interrelated works of art.

“PPP Please Wow Me” (2022) is a choreographed workout routine in a public light rail live streamed on CNC machined sculptures in and around a fight cage at Galleri Knipsu. A large focus of the work takes a CNC machined sculpture in the middle of a fight cage as a canvas for live video installations and interactive media performance. Laundry uses sound, video and light- ing cues to draw out the sculpture’s topography as a place for a critical feminist speculation on virtual bodies and crypto art.

The choreographed piece takes place live streamed from Lydgalleriet in the centre of Bergen following a 35 minute training route to the suburbs at Galleri Knipsu. The performance continues in situ at Knipsu for a 16-minute live performance in which Laundry tells the strange story of the rise of women’s NFT communities and their cooptation by pop star Madonna.

The project is part live-streamed city tour, and part high-pressure physical training ground of Guy Debord’s “Theory of the Dérive” In it Laundry explores how so-called crypto art is itself contributing to destabilized notions of the self in online communities. Physical training and a new genre of crypto art made for profile pictures are part of the world Laundry examines. The project specifically focuses on the NFT-World of Women phenomenon. The World of Women (WoW) NFT is a collection of 10,000 non-fungible tokens (NFTs). It is promoted as a tool for female empowerment.

In this exhibition motifs made in VR are transmogrified onto CNC machined extruded Styrofoam and 3D printed resin parts. The torso motifs playfully work as a critique of NFT representation and genderwashing of the body.

Laundry sculpts and paints in VR on a daily bases, as a kind of digital training ground. Their digital tool kit is presented at Knipsu. Laundry’s process starts with a solid 3D sculpture, then it is stretched out across physical materials. A strand of exploration for this project is to consider the way that the pumping up of physical features in digital space can occur physically. The cul- minating attention of the work centers on a live performance in a fight cage that pumps up and deflates expectations about the fight to catch the glamour and investment opportunity of NFT avatars.