Shower Thoughts
Installation, Performence, Book | 2024
A book
"Shower Thoughts" is an artist book combining quirky social experiments, serious theories, and artwork documentation—all centered on the shower.
Moving beyond these experiments, the book examines the eco- and techno-political dimensions of showers as both personal experiences and networked systems, aiming to reveal how showers create the illusion of individual sterility while uncovering the infrastructure of that illusion. By drawing on post-digital aesthetics and science and technology studies, the book reframes our commonsense beliefs about autonomy, illustrating how repetitive bodily actions network isolated "users" into larger systems, much like digital networks, forming an unconscious community. Ultimately, the book explores the blurred boundaries between private and public, wet and dry, and individual and collective.
Text by Ally Yanxiu Luo
Edited by Vince Warne
Design by Rui Liao
120 x 177 mm
Softcover
106 pages
English
ISBN 979-889692120-2
Stockists:
Bungee Space
Accent Sisters
Metalabel
Secret Riso Club
Printed Matter
An Installation
Dimensions:
220 x 180 x 60 cm
Medium:
Peltier thermoelectric module, wood, pump, CPU cooling block, brass, vinyl tubing
Description/Statement:
"Shower Perpetuus" is an installation that repurposes liquid CPU cooling systems as guerrilla shower devices. At room temperature, condensation drips down from CPU cooling blocks onto whoever stands beneath it, thus creating a shower made out of each other's breaths.
A Sound Archive
"Shower Hotline" is a mini sound archive that distributes and collects recordings of shower sounds. It invites callers to "shower" in a public space and explore the playful tension between private and public.
Anyone can call the toll-free number to listen to an anonymous recording of someone else's shower. The hotline tapped into the overlap between "the extremely private and the extraordinarily public" (Bookchin, 2009) in order to generate "a hopeful revelation of an unconscious community which we can trace through the mass archive" (Chun, 2016).