Mechanized Intimacy: The 24 Hour Kissing Project "1. Nick"

The first of Rhine Bernardino's twenty-part Mechanized Intimacy series, this video is a one-minute montage of 1,440 stills as the artist kisses a white male continuously for twenty-four hours, taking a picture every minute throughout the process. By framing the kiss as an act of endurance as opposed to a sexual or romantic gesture, the work portrays a woman who is in conscious control of her body and the situation. Orchestrating her collaboration with a stranger, Bernardino subverts mainstream and social constructs of intimacy and the fetishistic trope of the docile Asian woman. The work also critiques the world at large, exploring our desensitisation to intimate images and the reductive and mechanistic representation of interpersonal relations in the digital age.