QUESTION: Can you tell me something more about your actual experiences in Japan and the work you did on Japanese sex museums?

ANSWER: I went there for the first time in 1990 for a holiday. It was wild, a total mind-fuck, completely and utterly in every possible way. The idea that the art world and commercial world were fused together in some kind of strange way. Then I was in Japan just about six months ago as a good friend of mine had some details in a book on some of the museums that exist in the countryside throughout Japan. All sorts of museums. Everything from sex museums to pregnancy museums, to menstrual museums to bulldozer museums. You name it, it’s there. There’s lots of regional museums spread right throughout the country, and there was a small kind of chapter on the sex museums. I knew they were in an area down on the coast called Toba but I didn’t have an address or anything. So I had to search around and ask around. I eventually managed to find one of the museums and the owner was really friendly and I explained in broken Japanese what I was attempting to do and he was cool with that, there was no problem.
The museum looked like it was like an amazing 1960's 2001 Space Odyssey era of retro futuristic sex center that was looking at the future of human sexuality in the year 2001. It just so happened to be 2001 when I was shooting it. In its heyday the museum would have been really amazing, because there was all this lighting and they were playing this sixties fuzz guitar music and I think it was actually meant to be interactive, but they had no repair money to fix anything. It wasn’t really functioning that well, but you could walk by a certain mannequin and they would start waving their arms and moving their torso and stuff like that. Because it was so broken down, a lot of the stuff wasn’t working and the hands were missing and things were really dusty, but it was absolutely incredible. In some ways the run down nature of it was even more interesting. The idea that this was a view for human sexuality for the future in the past, and now we were in the future.

QUESTION: Was it an art museum or a sex educational museum?

ANSWER: Entertainment/educational mostly it was for young couples to check out on holiday and the futuristic sex museum aspect of it was only on one floor. Above it was the standard 'Sex Throughout the Ages' division, like samurai sex and all the rest of it. That was interesting, too, but it wasn’t as fascinating and freaky as the futuristic one. There was a weird narrative running through there. From what I could ascertain through the images, super vixens or super bimbos were captured from Mars, and they were impregnated in these capsules with some kind of alien sperm of some description, basically under the guise of creating a super race of super humans that were nymphomaniacs or sex bimbos. The video that I shot of it can in no way do justice to the museum, because it was this constructed environment with these incredible sets and dioramas.

QUESTION: I saw the image of a human being connected to a tube. Can you explain that image for me? It looked a bit like an enema to me.

ANSWER: Yeah, the tubes were like enemas fused with sperm donation. I think that they research impregnating these women to breed this new race, this kind of hybrid species, but the first time they did it, according to the story in the museum, it didn’t work. So, there’s a mutant strain of super humans. But the thing about the sex museum, also, is that the minute I saw it I just fell in love with it, because it was a merging of retro schlock horror science fiction, fused with something really quite perverse and mutant. When I exhibited this work, I presented it as an installation consisting of an alien sperm bank type thing, very much influenced from the museum, with these tubes so you could potentially make a sperm donation, while you were watching the video.


Excelsior 3000, photo by Ian Haig.
http://www.ianhaig.net/Excelsior.htm

QUESTION: And do you use a similar theme in your most recent installation-piece on Japanese toilets?

ANSWER: It's called Excelsior 3000 and it came about from my previous experience in Japan, as well and the kind of fascination with toilets that they have pretty much in any kind of domestic situation, the idea of the ‘super-toilet’ In a friend’s place that I stayed with, they had what I think is referred to as ‘princess toilets’. Amazing things that look like they are from another planet or something. Then, before I went to Japan, I was in Mexico City just for a holiday and I came down with a really bad case of a stomach parasite. It was a major infection that got more and more complicated. So I then started to think about toilets and think about bowels, and intestines, and stomachs and bowel movements and constipation and all this kind of stuff, and started to fantasize about a toilet, this device that could almost be seen as coming from another planet. Its landed here on earth to relieve me of this burden and to relieve me of this problem I was having this kind of fantasy ‘super toilet’. So I was in Japan. I visited bathroom showrooms and it just kind of clicked from there. So basically, I’m in the process now of finishing off this project, which features a Japanese toilet that's been heavily customized. It’s got a hydraulic system, so the seat goes up, and all this other stuff attached to it, all this other plumbing. It’s got video screens and it’s got audio. The audio is going to play this kind of soundscape on themes like bowel movements and the digestive system. I was very interested in this idea of the video/audio sequences, being like pornogrpahy for your bowls, playing naturalistic scenes etc, to put you in the mood… I was looking at this idea of the toilet being an interface of sorts, an extension of our own digestive system, and the toilet as a form of technology we use everyday and don’t really think about.
I was very influenced by a Japanese anime called 'Rogin Z' that featured a hospital bed that was housing an elderly guy, and this hospital bed became more and more monstrous to the point that it was overtaking the whole room. It overtook his whole body, this hospital bed. So that stirred the idea of having a toilet that looked like it could have been from another planet and was some form of life support system for your bowel, which kept you alive The center of your universe is your bowel. You’ve got to keep your bowel alive no matter what.