i love you i really do
Carlos Sanchez

In the summer of 1970, before her rise to fame, Bette Midler made her debut at the Continental Baths, an underground gay bathhouse in New York City. These performances sparked public intrigue, eventually deterring the primary clientele as the space transformed into a spectacle for its new (straight) patrons. The baths eventually shut down due to the exodus of its regulars.

This sequence of events, akin to instances of gentrification, can be viewed as a form of modulation between spectacle and social acceptability, curiosity and suppression—especially concerning the cultures of minority communities.

i love you i really do is an AI drag performance that explores these tensions as they are embedded in consumer AI software. When images of gay sex are fed into these products, they produce either abstract, grotesque amalgamations of flesh, carefully avoiding any obvious markers of male-male sexuality, or attempt to transform the bodies into nude female bodies, visualized graphically without hesitation. i love you i really do seeks to illuminate these cybernetic systems, questioning the modulation of visibility and acceptability within both historical contexts and their implantation into modern technological frameworks.

Presented as part of Strat Coffman’s The Railings - https://archleague.org/article/strat-coffman-the-railings/

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Carlos Sanchez is a multimedia artist and designer who lives and works in Los Angeles, CA.

IG/TW: @totalclownbaby
M: mail@carlos-sanchez.info