Domestic Tetsuo
家庭の哲：畫奴

CW: BLOOD
Running Time: 10mins32s
Produced, designed, performed, edited independently
Shot with Canon 60D, Dragon Touch action cameras, Sony DV

Domestic Tetsuo is a performance film where a consumer cleaner robot, Tetsuo, erratically contaminates a domestic space with my menstruation blood jettisoned from the masculine, sterilised landscape of innovations and physiological enhancement. Contemporary everyday devices are largely designed to engage in surface-limited interactions and disconnect from the visceral, messy aspects of the human body. Their marketed values are also largely limited to usefulness and the alleviation of human labour, often optimised in an environment meticulously cleaned, devoid of dust, liquid, and contagions. The dominance of Western science, progress, and health prevails in the exclusionary pedagogy of the abject body and the fate of technological products that fall out of favour or fail to serve their initial functions.

Tetsuo is a cyborg (Haraway,1991) fed with bodily wastes instead of pure, clean disinfectant. It wastefully slithers across the space in blood and appears to be utterly engrossed in ensnaring itself in old cable wires, obligating additional human labour to intervene. Tetsuo belongs to an alternative reality of artificial stupidity, where consumer electronics are useless and defiant, aggravating increased human labour. The Venga! RVC 3000 BS digresses from its intended use and ensues unanticipated effects from engaging with the wasteful, abject body. It also confronts the often unseen and gendered role in domestic labour that is increasingly rendered obscure by the sleek interfaces of modern gadgets.

Tetsuo borrows its name from polysemous kanji 哲男 - meaning “Iron Man” and “Philosophical Man”. It playfully denominates both the metal-machine-blob entity slithering away in Shinya Tsukamoto’s cyberpunk bodily trauma series (Tetsuo: The Iron Man, 1989) and the venous mutation of vascular nerves enfleshed from a biker boy obtaining destructive catalytic power in the AKIRA franchise (Otomo, 1988).