XXXIII

Throughout the video, the camera focuses on a toilet located in a bathroom. A person in sweatpants and clogs who is only filmed up to the middle of their thighs enters the bathroom. In slow motion, and with interference noises in the background, the video shows how they pull down their pants while bending their knees to take a seat on the toilet. In their panties one can see a smartphone showing a menstrual app. After sitting on the toilet for a short while, the person takes some toilet paper to wipe themselves, throws it into the toilet, pulls up their pants, and flushes. Then they walk out of the bathroom. The last image shows the same scene as in the beginning: a toilet in a bathroom. The video is played in a loop.

In My Panties

Created and contributed by Johanna Levy, 2017

Keywords: Auto-ethnographic collage

In My Panties is an auto-ethnographic, audiovisual collage that applies the techniques of re-contextualization, deceleration, and cycling in order to reinterpret and appropriate everyday intimate technologies as are menstrual apps. The work is structured in three acts: arrival, confrontation, and parting. In the second act, the interference noises extracted from interview recordings with the period app users seek to underline the agency of smartphones.

The work addresses questions of human–non-human interactions and their embodied, material-digital implications. What happens when we digitize menstrual flows? What changes in our understanding of app-human interactions when blood and data flows are confronted as material agents? Do we become cyborgs and if yes, to what extent and how is it that we become cyborgs?