beck haberstroh on Victor Castañeda H
Victor Castañeda H, still from Ayyy Hermanas, 2022, virtual reality
[Image description: The corner of the first room inside the virtual reality world of Ayyy Hermanas. Three large posters hang on the wall, while a small stand— reminiscent of tool stands in medical facilities— holds a liquid dispenser. A red, alien-like figure stands behind a metallic-looking bar in the right corner.]
When two things are described as “opposites,” it signals that those things are different from each other yet share underlying characteristics. Cold and hot are both temperatures. Fast and slow are both speeds. Bright white fluorescents and dim colored LEDs are both types of lighting. A hospital ID and a club wristband are both bracelets. Places that might seem so different are shown to have a shared logic.
Ayyy Hermanas is a virtual reality hospital-night club. Let’s take a tour.
We enter a cavernous hall built out of pink and blue blocks. They look like stone, but as we walk closer, the blocks turn out to be wrinkled pieces of notebook paper, tiled by the hundreds to form the architecture of the room. Plastered across these walls are crayon-scrawled billboards advertising ‘Pediatrics,’ ‘Cyber Glamor Thursday Nights,’ ‘Glow Your Essence Wednesday,’ and ‘File Crash Sundays.’ In the middle of the room, a variety of characters are clustered. Glowing red children vibrate alongside neon stick figures and green officials with their arms outstretched. There’s an oversized bottle of prescription medication, spilling pills across the floor. A swarm of newborns hover in gelatinous blobs above our heads. In the corner, an aluminum bar squats and a red alien waits to serve us—either drinks or clipboards with paperwork. The alien has ‘soon’ written in script above their head. What are we waiting for?
Still from Ayyy Hermanas, 2022, virtual reality
[Image description: A vast room stretches in front of us. Giant images adorn the walls— one, a photograph of three children, the other, a multicolored drawing. A blue table with chairs is set towards the back. A giant pill bottle sits on the ground, medication spilling out of it. What appears to be a giant ring pop floats above the floor. Red, gelatinous blobs hover overhead. A variety of figures, including a green ghost, crowd the floor.]
Welcome to Ayyy Hermanas, Victor Castañeda H’s recent virtual reality sculpture. This is the ‘newborn unit-cafeteria-bar,’ one of the three kaleidoscopic rooms that make up the hospital-night club. The other two are the ‘dance floor-operating room’ and the ‘waiting room-patio,’ of course. The work is often displayed on a virtual reality headset whose video feed plays on a TV, so that while only one person at a time can explore the world, many others can watch along. In front of the TV sits a large papier-mâché monster—your friend for your journey through Ayyy Hermanas.
Installation view of Ayyy Hermanas, 2022, virtual reality and papier-mâché. Institute of Contemporary Art San Diego. Photo: Philipp Scholz Rittermann
[Image description: A purple and blue papier-mâché monster, roughly the height of a person, sits in front of a TV in a white-walled gallery. The TV displays the interior of Ayyy Hermanas. A multicolored blanket is wrapped around the monster’s legs, and it wears one checkered sock.]
This virtual reality hospital-night club combines the artist’s personal audiovisual archives with drawings and 3D models to reveal alternative kinds of life and embodiment. In and out of hospitals as a child, Castañeda H learned to make his own worlds for entertainment, daydreaming with toys to create elaborate fantasies that distracted him from the boredom and discomfort of clinical settings. This need to escape later fueled his time clubbing as a young queer man in Los Angeles. (Ayyy Hermanas, gay slang for "oh sisters” in Spanish, references those nights out dancing with friends.) Castañeda H made field recordings of these evenings in the years that he was producing this piece, and this collection of the sounds of his friends at bars and clubs forms the basis of the upbeat, textured audio in Ayyy Hermanas.
The hospital and the club are very different environments, and someone’s experience of either will vary depending on geography, age, income, race, gender, ability, sexuality, and so many other things. But to generalize: hospitals are highly regimented, whereas clubs play fast and loose. Hospitals are bright, clean, and organized, whereas clubs are dark, dirty, and crowded. Hospitals are places I have to go because my body has somehow been deemed unwell; clubs are places I choose to go to have fun. At hospitals I listen to strangers, and at clubs I listen to friends. At hospitals I hear machines, and at clubs I hear music.
And yet, as Ayyy Hermanas shows us, these two spaces have much in common. Both can be expensive or exclusive. Both can manage bodily pleasures and pains. Both involve special outfits (hospital gowns, glitter), movements (lying down, dancing), and performances (the operating table, the DJ’s stage). Both utilize a sequence of spaces that transport me further away from the everyday—whether from the lobby to the waiting room to the exam table or from the line to the bar to the dance floor. And both require a navigation between my lived body and the body I do not inhabit but I am told would be more healthy or more desirable. The hospital and the club can both be haunted by a kind of platonic ideal against which othered bodies are measured, with consequences to those most marginalized.
Still from Ayyy Hermanas, 2022, virtual reality
[Image description: Giant red figures crowd the space in front of us. They appear to be scribbled out of thick lines yet appear three-dimenionsal. Five photographs, which appear to be from the 80’s or 90’s, adorn the far wall. Elsewhere in the room, surgical tools are suspended in the air and green figures dance on hospital gurneys.]
Above all, both are places that are about being alive. The hospital and the club both offer to transform, heal, and sometimes save our bodies, through different kinds of group collaboration. They both define, in different ways, what a good life feels like.
In a recent Artforum essay, Alexandro Segade uses the term “unalive,” which has proliferated in online spaces as a way to evade censorship, as inspiration for exploring similar themes. He writes:
“A REDDIT USER POSTS, ‘My mom told me to unalive myself because I am gay.’ The thread responds (and I paraphrase, slightly): ‘Your egg donor sucks and doesn’t deserve the term ‘mom.’’ To unalive yourself is to allow the forces of oppression to remove you from life. Algospeak neologisms are coined to avoid AI censorship; sublimation produces a new sign. The death drive merges with the life instinct to create a new condition: unaliving. Not the opposite of ‘liveness,’ as in the TV era’s distinction between the prerecorded and the happening-now—we are way past that after two years of nonstop Zoom meetings and streaming performance art from empty theaters—but the sense that life and death, between and after, are more and more the same.”
Segade argues that the Anthropocene and “imminent planetary annihilation” has produced the possibility for “an unhuman consciousness.” Existing in an unalive state allows him to feel the presences of extrahuman and nonhuman entities. In Castañeda H’s virtual hospital-club, we are surrounded by representations of these very kind of entities—glitches, ghosts, and unnameable yet undeniably animated beings. Both the hospital and the club are spaces of transition where the body enters altered states that contend with death—whether from illness, injury, infection, drugs, alcohol, addiction, depression, sociopolitical violence, or myriad other threats. By entering these spaces, we are presented with a wider view of life, and can become attuned to the variations of living that surround us.
And so, as I explore the flashing, vast, and crowded world of Ayyy Hermanas, I am continually confronted by my own assumptions about what it means to feel alive and my own dreams of what kind of body I want to inhabit. When explaining this work, Castañeda H brings up his interest in what he calls “the non-body.” This idea builds off scientific understandings of the human body as networks of electrical currents that are passed between cells and the nervous system. The cyberspace references in this world reinforce this knowledge that we are, literally, electric. The artist defines “the non-body'' as this signal flow that happens within each of us as we process sensory experiences. While the idea of ‘the body’ often prioritizes our visible, external, and fleshy forms, the non-body is internal. By thinking of ourselves as non-bodies, we make space for the fantasy of having any body, or no body at all. For Castañeda H, the non-body is about the pleasure in this potential for bodilessness, in existing as pure signal. He jokes that a French euphemism for orgasm is ‘petite mort’ which translates to ‘a small death’—intense pleasure leading to an out-of-body moment.
Still from Ayyy Hermanas, 2022, virtual reality
[Image description: Two large kegs sit in the corner of a room, next to a pool table and a row of flowers. In the foreground, two glowing, green stick figures with pink eyes recline in each other's arms on a blue couch.]
Both the hospital and the club offer opportunities to enter states of bodilessness, transporting ourselves through medication, music, collective energy, or other means. And though both spaces reify identity categories, they can also both be the ones that allow us to remake them. The drawn figures in Castañeda H’s world present very few identity markers, with little discernible ethnicity or gender. Figures are rendered through glowing lines and gloopy masses. These beings cannot properly be called people. Indeed, the only visually verifiable humans in this world are the artist and his family members, present through rephotographed snapshots splashed large across some of the walls. Our tethers to the human world are joyful images of a Mexican-American immigrant family. They float above us, their bodies projecting the founding narrative of the space like presidential portraits or stained glass.
Still from Ayyy Hermanas, 2022, virtual reality
[Image description: A view from below of four family snapshots on the wall, next to a large poster that says “Nurse Station”. They are all framed in red rectangles.]
While there are few adults, Ayyy Hermanas is filled with the figure of the child— not only as photographs of Castañeda H as a child himself, but as hovering babies, as oversized toys, and as elements of the drawing style, which calls to mind doodles on the corners of school pages or shopping lists. What to make of all of these children? Children can be complicated for queer people—not only is the path towards gathering families with children much more difficult, but the very figure of the child has often been used, in the United States, to pass anti-LGBT legislation. This is apparent in Florida’s current laws against discussing sexuality and gender in schools, justified with a supposed need to ‘protect the children.’ To me, the inclusion of images of children and childhood toys in Ayyy Hermanas pushes back against centuries of rhetoric—from both mainstream and queer America—that puts distance between childhood and queerness. The child’s approach to playing, imagining, pranking, and dreaming are tools that can help us navigate the existential questions posed by the hospital-club. Castañeda H suggests that we take this all in with a sense of humor.
This link between the hospital and the club isn’t new. Since the AIDS pandemic, these places have always had a relationship for gay men, in particular. Castañeda H came of age in the wake of that mass queer death, already familiar with operating tables and waiting rooms. Today, we find ourselves in another pandemic, and amidst competing definitions of life itself, from opposing political parties. Pregnant people are commanded to carry cells to term while gun violence, the number one killer of children, goes unaddressed—one example of these dark ironies among many. By rendering a world that does not separate the sick from the healthy, the pleasure from the pain, and the human from the beyond, Ayyy Hermanas provokes us to question: who is well, after all? Death lurks as the throbbing green and yellow ghost in the virtual crowd.
That Ayyy Hermanas is presented in virtual reality further emphasizes the experience of the body. While most art mediums can be casually observed from a distance, virtual reality is an immersive experience. In Ayyy Hermanas, Castañeda H has not given the viewer a body, so when I put on the headset and enter this new world, I become bodiless. I look down and my legs have disappeared—all I see is the glowing floor. For the time being, I can pretend that I am a non-body, floating as electrical currents.
Still from Ayyy Hermanas, 2022, virtual reality
[Image description: A closeup of the corner of a room, where various pieces of hospital equipment are arranged, including a bed with a white sheet covering a body. A green, scribbled figure dances on top of the white sheet. In other parts of the image we see the figures and objects in the virtual world glitch, distorting into lines of color.]
The hospital-club dialectic can be seen in the aesthetics of this virtual world, as well. Both sterile medical spaces and virtual reality art are often characterized by smooth surfaces and clean gradients, free from dust, spills, and breaks. Queer night clubs, on the other hand, bring to mind rough textures, oversaturated colors, handmade flyers, campy decorations, and fabulous flourishes. These different approaches to space collide in the process of constructing Ayyy Hermanas. Castañeda H scans drawings and manipulates them in Photoshop to make the textures that form the basis of his virtual reality sculptures and animations. He also imports prefabricated 3D objects from crowd-sourced virtual reality libraries, sometimes altering them to fit the space. The final result is a densely layered world where the artist’s hand is fantastically present between crackling colors, shimmering metals, electric lines, and undulating objects—at once clean and messy, familiar and bizarre, quiet and exuberant.
Like the drawings, the sounds in Ayyy Hermanas are the result of physical, spatial, and digital processing. As we glide through this world, we hear dance hits re-recorded by Castañeda H while out at clubs and bars with friends. If Castañeda H’s biological family is commemorated through images, his chosen family is celebrated through audio. The field recordings emphasize how these songs are experienced in community. We can hear the room tones of the different buildings and the voices and interjections of friends and strangers. Just as our non-bodies confront idealized bodies in the hospital-club, in Ayyy Hermanas the sound of a song being played in real space confronts the version that is produced in a recording studio.
Still from Ayyy Hermanas, 2022, virtual reality
[image description: A massive image of the artist DJing fills a back wall. In front of it, two gloopy, green figures float, dancing, above gurneys. To the right, a “waiting room” sign flashes.]
At some point in Ayyy Hermanas’s world, we hear chanting coalesce through the audio: “One more song! One more song!” We aren’t ready to go home just yet. By entertaining the possibility of the non-body, Ayy Hermanas embraces the other forms of being—of life—that can become possible when the human is decentered. When becoming a non-body, do we become a swarm, a waterfall, an aroma, a glitch? The third room is a waiting room-slash-patio with figures dancing on a gurney, a row of chairs with smiley-face-figures and a flower garden next to a pool table. A poster on the wall asks: “Can you see the glitching ghost?” In our unalive state, we can see phantoms, and in our non-body, we can feel glitches.
Still from Ayyy Hermanas, 2022, virtual reality
[Image description: We look up at a black sky full of technicolor stars and a sign that says “San Fernando Valley.” The entrance to the hospital-club is on our right.]
Outside the three rooms of the hospital-club, Castañeda H built a bus stop platform, the final piece of Ayyy Hermanas. Star-shaped stickers were scanned and rendered to make the colorful night sky. When we take off the headset, our bodies will return. For a moment longer, we appreciate being energized matter, transforming as sparks.
beck haberstroh is an interdisciplinary artist and writer in San Diego.