Deadline for applications is Tuesday 18 February to attend our free art-writing course, in collaboration with Bergen Kunsthall and Office for Contemporary Art Norway. Lana is a surveillance AI housed inside various plastic cones strategically placed around the set β a beach resort in Mexico.
She is on a mission. Her aim is to convert unsuspecting contestants into the kind of commitment-oriented heterosexuals that would be the toast of evangelical summer camps. When a group of somethings arrive at the resort, expecting a month of sex and sun on camera, she wakes from her digital slumber. The aim of this game, she politely instructs the contestants, is to remain as chaste as possible. Too Hot to Handle , , production still.
Courtesy: Netflix. Reality dating shows operate as a kind of fetish. They indulge pre-existing power relations, aspirations and anxieties by transforming them into dramatic scenarios and returning them to the public as entertainment. Because of this they double-up as weathervanes for the preoccupations of the day. Too Hot to Handle may be crass, but it is an apt manifestation of the fears and excitements of a world governed by technology and with increasingly zealous streaks of religious nationalism.
An AI with deeply regressive attitudes to sex and zero regard for privacy, Lana is the nightmare love child of Big Tech and Saint Augustine. Religious laws were put in place in an attempt to control how, when and why people were physically intimate. Too Hot to Handle gives the desire-police a contemporary reboot. In , the Garden of Eden is a collection of Instagrammable cabanas with mandalas painted on the walls, and the all-seeing eye has been replaced by an authoritarian AI masquerading as a supernatural nanny.
Too Hot to Handle is not the only Netflix show that reveals a growing fixation with orthodox attitudes to sexuality. The ratings hit Love Is Blind is premised upon the production of hastily assembled arranged heterosexual marriages. Shot from above, the pods are revealed to be a network of dark, octagonal cells: part soulless hotel, part lonely bedroom, part padded tomb. As contestants propose to one another in the solitude of the pods, temporarily ensorcelled by chimeras of happiness and acceptance, what many of them appear to want is an escape from the confusion and loneliness of contemporary life.
