Is a lipstick a semiconductor?
Arsenic Ballerinas takes an excursion from mineral toxicities found in cosmetics and their properties to catch radio, all the way to YL (Young Lady) Operators and their friendship cards, lipsticks in war and morals of paint and powder.
A lipstick takes the shape and materiality of a bullet, sometimes made of Radium, sometimes with Lead all the way through. Lead, Arsenic and Cinnabar (to list a few) colored faces for centuries. Found in early radio experiments and now in our computing devices, these heavy metals spread slowly from our lips to our computers. Arsenic Ballerinas sets an inquiry to find the technological entanglements between cosmetics and the development of transistors.
Lipsticks as defiance; lipsticks as poison; lipsticks as bullets; lipstick as power. Eccentric historical makeup recipes, old concoctions and laboratory apparatuses are engaged in tactile experiments. Substances are distilled, waxes melt, powders pressed, and pigments crushed. High voltage applied. The once very controversial red lipstick is prepared to resonate in strident sound textures from its inherited history. We all end up with red lips.
✹ Main exhibition @ Esoteric Ecotechnics. Irrational Computation and Conspiratorial Networking
Close
Ioana Vreme Moser is a Romanian sound artist engaged with hardware electronics, speculative research, and tactile experimentation. In her practice, she uses rough electronic processes to obtain different materialities of sound. She places electronic components and control voltages in different situations of interaction with her body, organic materials, lost and found items, and environmental stimuli. From these collisions, synthesized sounds emerge to carry personal narrations and observations on the history of electronics, their production chains, wastelands, and entanglements in the natural world.
