Critical Closeness, Intimate Distance: Encounters in the Love Art Laboratory

The paper is engaged with the difficulties of dealing with emotion in the encounter with art. Its focus is on closeness and intimacy, and the ambivalent feelings that often go with them, not least when those feelings are technologically mediated and critically filtered. It looks at the intertwining of closeness and distance as critical modes, focusing on Annie Sprinkle and Elizabeth Stephens’ public sharing of their relationship in their Love Art Laboratory project, and the ‘EcoSex’ work that emerged from it. The paper asks, how to get intimate at a distance? How should we embrace the difficulties that shifting emotions bring to our critical understanding?