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Thirst Trap

11. 06. 2024 

Thirst Trap is an exhibition organised by fifteen graduating Central Saint Martins BA Fine Art students.

A thirst trap is a photograph (such as a selfie) or video shared for the purpose of attracting attention or desire. It is always clearly posted or sent for the attention and admiration of one or more people.
From a physiological standpoint, endorphins and neurotransmitters like oxytocin and dopamine can be released with the process of sharing thirst traps, leading to a sense of pleasure and an ambiguous or mas- turbatory alternative for actual physical sexual contact.

By strategically walking the border between revelation and conceal- ment, the thirst trap seeks to entice the libidinal drives of its intended audience and, by innocently stealing their attention, manipulate them.

This publication contains a commissioned text by writer, curator and cyberneticist Elliott Higgs. His work explores the relationship between visual culture, class politics, speculative technologies and the occult.


Eric Arnal
Joana Azevedo
Aarony Bailey
Rory Bakker-Marshall
Noah Bates
Ellen Dunne
Abbie Heller
Callum Jones
Ela Kazdal
Blue Marcus
Sapphire Prust
Camilla Ridgers
Amelie Schlaeffer
Charlotte Seux
Willow Swan







Subterranean Desire Modulation

Elliott Higgs

@xenodemonology

Thirst traps are tactical aesthetic devices, a targeted means of deploying desire at close or long range in order to capture and weaponise affec- tive attention. The practice is a modern mutation of the Cold War honey pot, a clandestine agent sent to extract government secrets and com- promising material from enemy officials through seduction, blackmail and subterfuge. But when desire began to be channelled online, in the spectral virtual world, it became exposed to new forces, incentives and allegiances. In our contemporary image-based network-communication paradigm, where everyday erotic impulses are regurgitated through the physics of machinic, extractive platform economies, the sweet lure of honey has been replaced with an insatiable thirst. Flows of technologi- cal mediation work on us, and increasingly, within and through us. Psy- cho-chemical dependencies are formed between neural pathways in the brain and the marketised semiotics of online social experience. While thirst traps are occasionally deployed to facilitate meaningful physical encounters, the success of such posts is measured primarily by their metrics—how much attention did the image elicit? The space between us contracts and expands; the screen flattens our affect, artificial scarci- ties abound, and we are at once close and distant.

A popular plastic surgery clinic in the Nonhyeon-dong ward of Seoul’s Gangnam district has been fined for displaying a series of decorative towers housing shaven jawbone fragments culled from patients’ chins.1 The shards of bone, numbering over a thousand, were exhibited within two transparent floor-to-ceiling pillars which flanked the otherwise matte- black sterility of the clinic’s laminate lobby. Each individual fragment was inscribed with the name of a corresponding patient, a detail highlighted in an Instagram post uploaded by the clinic which also served to alert authorities. Strategies of elective orthognathic surgery are largely divided into two types: the ‘intra-mouth incision method,’ in which a saw blade

is inserted after making an incision in the mouth to cut off part of the jawbone, and ‘behind-the-ear square jaw surgery,’ in which a saw blade is inserted after making an incision behind the ear.2 According to Seoul’s Medical Waste Control Act, medical facilities are required to submit
  1. 1  Chosun Ilbo, ‘Famous Gangnam plastic surgery clinic exhibits jawbone sculptures from 1,000 patients’ [https://www.chosun.com/site/data/html_dir/2014/01/23/2014012300122. html] (2014.01.23, 03:01)
  2. 2  Seol Guide Medical, ‘Jaw Surgery in Korea’ [https://seoulguidemedical.com/jaw-surgery- in-korea/] (2019.08.19)

tissues, organs and body parts removed during surgery for immedi-
ate processing, sterilisation and incineration. The clinic was ordered to remove the bone towers and fined around 3m won (£1,600) for violating medical waste disposal regulations. Jawbone shaving operations them- selves typically cost patients around 3.5m won. An official from the clinic declined to comment when pressed on the potential ritual implications of such twinned necrotic totems.

The distortions of networked visual culture are interacting with the sys- tems and inequities of contemporary cyber-capitalism to breed potent new aesthetic fictions. When posting an image of oneself online, users now have professional suites of photo-editing tools at their immediate disposal. Imperfections can be erased, and features exaggerated or diminished. We cast glamours, illusory spells to better position ourselves against an accelerated visual hierarchy. The case of the Gangnam plastic surgery clinic illustrates the role of the beauty-industrial complex within this matrix of relations—just as a photograph can be manipulated, so too can the body. What is lost, and what is gained, by partaking in this exchange? What manner of bargain is being struck?

Tools and technologies of aesthetic production, combined with the internalised incentive to render oneself visible online in return for tokens representative of social virtue (likes, shares, etc.), have changed how we perceive ourselves in relation to others. Social media is more accurately described as a social marketplace, and as users compete among them- selves for attention it is often visually shocking or maximalist content which is rewarded, circulated, and promoted to the top of our feeds. Shining porcelain crowds the mouth, fleshy parts are expanded and dissolved at will, and the epidermis of the face is endlessly lacquered, stretched and worked upon. The profit incentive reshapes the psychic mind-body in tandem with the virtual image, and even the ultra-wealthy struggle to maintain pace, despite a slew of youth-maintaining poultices, pills, procedures, blood transfusions and hormone replacement therapies flooding the luxury health and beauty market.3 The writer and pornog- rapher Jessica Stoya goes further, describing a near future of ‘synthetic pornography’, where the likenesses of real actors are ascribed to virtual performers who ‘aren’t limited by the range of what the human body can handle.’4
  1. 3  Mike Solana, ‘DON’T DIE: An Interview with Bryan Johnson’ [https://www.piratewires. com/p/bryan-johnson-interview] (2024.01.24)
  2. 4  Ben Davies, Art in the After-Culture, p.106 (2022)

All signs point to the encroaching retreat of material experience. As our various embodied and virtual personas contest against each other for psychic terrain, which self or selves will become most closely identified with?

One outcome is the dissolution of the semiotics of the face. We are entering a post-facial reality of virtualised avatars, an amalgamation of hypersexualised and unattainably perfect imagery which precipitates a cognitive dissonance between our self-perceptions and fabricated digital ideals. The philosopher and psychoanalytic theorist Isabel Millar renders this clearly,

‘The face is an existential black hole, both surface and depth. But while we used to fall in love with a beautiful image, on the usually misguided assumption that what lies beneath is even more fascinating, now the face is an essentially voyeuristic func- tion, both something to be looked at from afar and protected behind a screen. What lies beneath is no longer of interest, or at least assumed to be already on the surface.’5

Strange devices have inserted themselves between us, and our urges
are no longer entirely our own. Lyotard’s theory of libidinal economy describes the fundamental psychic drive of desire interacting with finan- cial models and machinic apparatuses.6 Rather than being predicated on material cycles of production and exchange, libidinal economy refers to the circulation and regulation of erotics, affects and intensities. In cyber- netic capitalism, advanced algorithmic delivery systems and neuroplastic interfacing (direct communication between machines and the brain) facili- tates the manipulation of desire en masse, orchestrating subliminal flows towards commercially and ideologically profitable ends. In this schema, desire functions as a terminal currency.

When navigating online social experience, each lure or trap deployed and engaged with amongst the timelines’s digital sensorium forms an internalised node within a panoptic network of virtual erotics, its poten- cy amplified by the feedback loops inherent to gamified platforms. If a certain mode of content attracts you, the algorithm will bring you more. If a certain mode of content performs well, you are encouraged to produce more. These nodes catalyse libidinal flows, creating frameworks and circuits of investment that perpetuate the surrounding machinery through the extraction of surplus desire. Experiences of dysmorphia, erotic cog- nitive dissonance and paranoiac schizophrenia are not mere anomalies, but rather systemic outcomes of a grasping libidinal techno-economy that seeks to completely territorialise affective libidinal potential.
  1. 5  Isabel Millar, Post-Facial [https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Q355fwTByxU] (2024.01.25)
  2. 6  Jean-François Lyotard, Libidinal Economy (1974)

This propagates a cult of para-reality on the societal level where authentic and artificial axiomatics of desire overlap, amplify and are rendered indis- tinguishable. We suffer from delusional parasitosis, and grow eyes on the inside. Programming occurs by chance (i.e, automatically).7

We might think of this programming as a form of possession by the profit incentive. As Deleuze and Guattari impress upon us, capitalism is con- structed on the ruins of the territorial and the despotic, representations of the mythic and tragic, but it re-establishes them in its own service and in other forms, as images of capital.8 As our mediated digital selves, we are encouraged to think and act as brand-entities. Successful brands
are supposedly built on emotional connections and visually compelling memetic messages—the same could be said for the follower counts of online influencers. As this marketing logic seeps out into the wider pop- ulace and becomes applied to all manner of online social dynamics we begin to recognise thirst traps as symptomatic of an age of technological over-immediacy, instant gratification, and captured desire. But where do the true dynamics of power lie, with the trappers, or with the trapped?

The real answer is with the platforms, and, ultimately, financial capital.
In gleaming lobbies the world over compacts are being formed between tech conglomerates and eery, inorganic forces; covenants with guileful models and black-box algorithms that we fail to clearly discern or com- prehend. In ignorance we often turn to idols, but in reality we are more likely the ones being trained—for an age of even greater atomisation. The social scientist Harry Collins warns of the dangers of ‘the surrender’, a more likely eventuality than the singularity, in which humanity enslaves itself to machines which we mistakenly perceive as intelligent and benev-olent.9

Desire circulates of its own volition, but remains vulnerable to compro- mise and co-option. Tiktok, the dancing app, reaches out with pure, abstracted content streams and compels the bodies of millions to shud- der and jerk in response. In 1518 a similar phenomena occurred in Stras- bourg, the Dancing Plague, where a seemingly viral outbreak of dyskine- sias caused villagers to cavort to the point of exhaustion, suffering heart attacks and strokes.10 Those who survived were taken to a mountain shrine to pray for atonement. Perhaps it is time we followed suit.
  1. 7  Vilém Flusser, Towards a Philosophy of Photography (1984)
  2. 8  Gilles Deleuze & Félix Guattari, Anti-Oedipus (1972)
  3. 9  Harry Collins, Artificial Intelligence: Against Humanity’s Surrender to Computers (2018)
  4. 10  Brian Hughes, Rhythm of the Unseen: The Bizarre Dancing Plague of 16th-Century Europe

(2023)