Everything is Manipulation
(Published in The Toe Rag, Issue 05, Technology, Spring 2025)
In Spray, at Season 4, Episode 6, Ella Fleck interrogates the margins of modernity through the manipulation of pheromones to procure sex.
‘Spray’ feels like the kind of exhibition which is meant to be seen when the sun has faded: the smoke-filled gallery of Season 4, Episode 6 has an apocalyptic feel that perfectly matches the 5pm shadows of wintery London. The fog evokes both a laboratory and a nightclub, with clouds regularly replenished by large, suspended pipes releasing opaque plumes of pheromones—specifically 5α-androst-16-en-3-one (Androstenone) and CYIQNCPLG-NH2 (Oxytocin). This display of affective hormones immediately signals the exhibition's erotically scientific subject matter: the procurement of sex through experiments in bioengineering.
This show is the culmination of a seven month research project by the artist Ella Fleck, in which the artist – in the guise of the fictional character Jonathan Michaels – infiltrated online forums, primarily populated by cisgender heterosexual men, who hope to manipulate women into sexual relationships through the use of artificial pheromones. The forum members believe that the topical use of hormonal chemicals, such as through manipulated colognes, taps into an ungovernable, animal impulse of biological desire, overriding the intuition of their object of longing, and protecting them against the discomfort of romantic rejection. Here, what might initially seem like a quirky obsession, or a pitiful clutch at a human connection, becomes more sinister. In an audio work created by Fleck and musician Calum Bowen, Fleck presents an AI-generated recantation of Michaels' almost-conquest. This disembodied voice narrates the character’s pursuit of his crush, ‘Gisele’, revealing his disturbed plotting for sexual connection. At first cloyingly self-pitying, Michaels’ words quickly turn into darker, base expressions of libidinal instinct. The listener assumes that it is Gisele who plays the role of the object, yet Michaels himself also emerges flattened, subsumed by angry desperation and violent impulses.
Michaels’ disposition represents an increasingly violent and often extractive attitude to sex increasingly accepted in certain corners of the internet. This is capitalism meets involuntary celibates, wherein interpersonal relationships have become commodified vis-à-vis manipulative technologies. Over recent years, an industry of pheromone colognes and perfumes has proliferated, exacerbated by sponsored content and internet advertisements promising ‘true love’ or ‘irresistible manhood’. In 2014, a now-closed bar on Hackney’s Broadway Market even hosted a singles night, where participants chose partners based on the smell of their ziplocked, three-day-old T-shirts. Experimenting with biological indicators of attraction isn’t inherently harmful, but dissecting the body for parts and using its remnants to manipulate women into sex reflects something troubling at play: a disturbing trend in a wider movement of male dominance and control.
This insidious use of technology can be better understood through Walter Benjamin’s concept of ‘rubble’, left behind by the relentless ‘storm of progress’. In Benjamin's Theses on the Philosophy of History, the term ‘rubble’ refers to the discarded remnants, both material and cultural, that are cast aside as a byproduct of relentless historical and technological advancement (the ‘storm’), and which are often overlooked or suppressed in the drive for progress. In this sense, Fleck attends to what is left behind. Sifting through the rubble, she scatters the basement room with dozens of printed chat-room screenshots. ‘Manipulation isn’t a bad thing’, reads one written by @domtheviolator. ‘Society has turned it into a bad thing’. In an increasingly atomised social order built upon technological progress, capitalism and the politics of shame, which emphasises individual failure and alienation from any kind of collectivised society, Fleck presents the manipulative use of pheromones for personal, sexual gain.
It is poignant that in spite of the artist’s interrogation of very contemporary concerns, she returns to animal material, the primal marker of body and territory: the pheromone. Using marginal forms of modern technology to artificially provoke a seemingly natural response, Fleck unleashes an uncanny experience. For Freud, the uncanny refers to the re-expression of repressed infantile or instinctual impulses, often in a distorted or unfamiliar form. Spray presents the dissolution of the natural and the engineered, drawing attention to the falsity of this binary, as well as the ways in which it is, conversely, structured and upheld. Indeed, on a subatomic level, the distinction between the artificial and the natural is apocryphal. The result is an unsettling experience of modernity and ‘progress’, resonating with Benjamin’s writings on the subject, which exposed modernity’s alienating forces but also uncovered its redemptive potential for aesthetic revolution.
Spray is a compelling example of modernity’s more disquieting, subterranean aspects, as realised through manipulative technologies such as the pheromone experimentation on which the show is centred. Though Fleck omits the human consequences of this particular technology (the exhibition’s sole female identity is Gisele, albeit seen only through Michaels’ eyes), and consequently positions herself only at the surface level of the sinister convergence of capitalism, technology and culture, the artist succeeds in arousing the modern uncanny. In this sense, she draws attention to the dissolution between nature and the artificial which seems to characterise contemporary (and uncanny) developments in technology, whether through artificial intelligence or bioengineering. Through making art of the ‘rubble’, Spray makes the marginal visible, asking us to make our own judgements on, and question our own responses to, its unnerving display. Why are we so drawn to this terrible fog, and what are we left with when it has dissipated?