Play4UsNow – Lena Chen

Dominatrices, cam models, and submissives unite in Play4UsNow, a multi-player game with a unique price of admission: your privacy. Meet real-life sex workers exploring data as a mode of domination and submission, as you – the player – fuel their desires with your information, attention, and compensation. Navigate sexy pop-ups and CAPTCHAs to find the secret entry into a password-encrypted digital dungeon. Relinquish yourself to the control of targeted algorithms, social media conditioning, and hypnotic GIFS. Play4UsNow holds a mirror up to the digitalization of identity, keeping you hostage until you ransom your thoughts, emotions, and secrets. Indulge in the hot new fetish that will transform your relationship to technology, sex, and capital. SUBMIT NOW.

Originally commissioned by Die Digitale, Play4UsNow consisted of a live digital performance streamed into the media arts festival’s exhibition space in Düsseldorf, Germany in November 2020.

Play4UsNow was originally created to highlight the censorship and algorithmic discrimination faced by sex workers such as those who performed in this work. I published “Enter The Data Dungeon: Sex Work & Digital Domination” in MIT Open DocLab’s Immerse, reflecting on the political limits and possibilities of digitally mediated erotic power exchange.

In May 2021, video documentation of Play4UsNow was shown at Die Digitale’s five-year retrospective, installed at Heinrich-Heine-Allee subway station in Düsseldorf. Within the first day, Rheinbahn, the public transit authority, shut down the gallery due to complaints that Play4UsNow was obscene and pornographic.

Subsequently, our team offered a re-edited blurred version of the video as a compromise, which was also rejected. Finally, after negotiations involving the city mayor and cultural affairs department, the video was moved to the Kunsthalle Düsseldorf, where it played in the foyer.

Installation view at Kunsthalle Düsseldorf (June 2021)

PRESS

Westdeutscher Rundfunk Köln: Pornographie? Streit um Düsseldorfer Kunstinstallation
Express: Warum zensiert Security U-Bahn-Kunst? Rheinbahn erklärt den Grund
Westdeutsche Zeitung: Ärger über Kurzfilm im U-Bahnhof
NRZ: Beschwerden: Rheinbahn unterbricht Kunstaktion in
Düsseldorf
NRZ: Zoff um “verstörendes” Video im Bahnhof hält an
NRZ: Von Kunst und Zensur

CREATORS
Lena Chen
Esben Holk
Stephanie Ballantine

PERFORMERS
Petra Blair
Mistress Amandara
Kiko
Goofy Toof
Vega Bonita
Goddess Vanessa
The Benefactress
Elle Peril

MODERATOR
Amelie von Godin

MUSIC
Chris Knipp

Commissioned by DIE DIGITALE with additional funding from:
Carnegie Mellon School of Art’s Interdisciplinary Award
Burners Without Borders NERT Civic Ignition Grant
Carnegie Mellon University GuSH Research Grant
Frank-Ratchye STUDIO for Creative Inquiry’s Residency-in-Your-Room Fellows