August 8, 2022

Jen Kutler has is a multidisciplinary artist and performer. She modifies found objects that are cultural signifiers of power, gender, queerness and intimacy to create atypical instruments, sculptures and multimedia environments. Her works explore common and discrepant experiences of familiar social tones using sounds and objects that are considered sexual, gendered, queer or othered to build interactive electronic media systems for performance and transmission. Through modifying, re-contextualizing, rebuilding, transforming – “queering” – these materials, I look to explore the degrees of separation between the inner and outer world, hyper-sexualization and de-sexualization, and the intuitive vs. concrete.

Cathode Ray Gun Point is an audio-visual performance piece in which Kutler relates stories by the light of a single match while wearing a lie detection circuit which controls the audio and visual environment. Video of Kutler reciting the text is manipulated by an RGB raster manipulation unit or “wobbulator” made from a vintage cathode ray tube projector and hand wound coils. The “wobbulator” is controlled by the lie detector’s signals. The stories told are accompanied by audio generated from the lie detector’s signals which return to the air via speakers to manipulate the match’s flame.

Cathode Ray Gun Point, Jen Kutler.