Machineries of joy: Futurotic

Futurotic manifests Ian Haig’s ongoing interest in the strange relations between the body and technology and, in particular, the peculiar and often disturbing uses people find for the gadgets that increasingly surround us at home and work. While the impetus for Futurotic arose from this interest in 'looking at everyday technological items and re-thinking them, transforming them', the specific preoccupation of this work involved the perverse sexual uses of domestic appliances. In the context of the trajectory of Haig’s work, there is something appropriate in this conjunction of, for example, vacuum cleaners and masturbation. But there is actually a vast literature devoted to the history of domestic appliances as sex devices and Haig has clearly done his homework. [Introduction]