№ 03Process · The Orgasm Project · 2017 → 2021
How an orgasm became a painting.
How La petite mort was made. My orgasm, recorded as brainwaves, drawn neuron by neuron, then painted onto canvas by a robot and a painter together. Five steps, shown plainly.
“If everything is digitizable, is everything also for sale? Does that sit right with you, ethically?” Dr. Karthik Kalyanaraman to Raghava KK · the question that started it
What cannot be digitised?
Burning Man, 2017. I went to the desert and came back with a two-hundred-year plan for crypto art: a manifesto hybridised onto a business plan, imagining a decentralised global repository of human imagination. The polarised worlds of art and business would not come together to build it.
What survived was a question, sharpened in conversation with my brother, the critic
Dr. Karthik Kalyanaraman: everything seemed digitisable, so everything seemed sellable.
Then what is the craziest thing one could sell? The most intimate, personal,
non-sellable it sold at Sotheby’s in 2021 item imaginable.
The answer was the orgasm: la petite mort, the little death, the one experience that is all body and all mind at once. The project records it as data, then turns the data back into a painting you stand in front of.
Four hands.
No single discipline can move an orgasm from a body to a canvas. Each step of the process belonged to a different collaborator.
Curatorial advisor: Myna Mukherjee. Master printer: Jeff Leonard.
An announcement, two years early.
The idea travelled as a spoken promise before it was a work. In 2019, on stage at the FofX festival in Uttarakhand, the neuroscientist Abhijeet Satani and I announced that we would one day capture my orgasm and turn it into art.
The orgasm is recorded as brainwaves.
With equipment developed by Abhijeet Satani, the studio in Bengaluru became a recording room. Electrodes were placed, the room prepared, and the capture rehearsed, first with music and painting, to test how the brain read on the machine, before the orgasm itself was recorded as neural data.
Primitive visualisation of the recorded orgasm · Bengaluru 2021 · Video: Abhijeet Satani
Every neuron becomes a brush stroke.
Harshit Agrawal brought the neuro-data into Blender and rebuilt it in three dimensions. The rule was set here, and it carries through to the finished painting: each firing neuron is turned into an individual brush stroke. The data was also rendered procedurally, and exported as a 3D brain object I could turn in my hands.
The visualised brain, turning · 2021 · Video: Harshit Agrawal
I choose the angle.
In New York, the science hands over to the hand. I chose a single viewing angle of the brain from the 3D file, then composed the painting in layers: the tangle of neural threads, and the garden of flowers and forms that grows on it. The data decides the structure; I decide everything else.
A robot and a painter, on the same canvas.
At the Artmatr lab, the digital file was returned to matter. Special oil pigments were prepared in a material-science lab set up by Artmatr in Israel. The contours of the artwork were turned into G-code for the robots. Then months of experiments in mark making, testing how a machine lays paint and how a hand answers it, before the final works were painted and printed, my hand working alongside the robots.
La petite mort.
The finished works: one large canvas and three studies, oil on canvas, painted and printed at the Artmatr lab. Launched at Sotheby's HQ, New York, in October 2021, alongside Boundless Space: The Possibilities of Burning Man, the charitable auction produced by Sotheby's and the Burning Man Project.
Fifteen seconds, now oil on canvas.
The Orgasm Project, the film · 2 min 08 · 2021
“There are some orgasms I regret and those that I don't.” To Rudra, Anaga, Jaya and Aadya.
After the canvas, the record keeps going.
Because the source is data, the work does not have to end at the wall. An AI that studied multiple orgasms generated new, synthetic ones, a Fake Male Orgasm and a Fake Female Orgasm: a future series grown from the same method. And the installation itself was designed to keep a robot in the room: a slow-moving arm built for human collaboration, sketched for the Sotheby's floor.
