about.
V for Vicious Project (V4V) is a research-driven exploration of Ethical Power Exchange and Transformation through Collaborative Guerrilla Performance, Performance Research, Embodied Dialogue, and Kinetic Installation, addressing the Shadow of Erotic Identity, Ascribed Status, and Shared Experience as Multidisciplinary Training Ground within the frameworks of Internet Culture, Neoliberal Capitalism, the Commercial Kink Sector, and Intersectional Feminism.
V4V counter-hegemonically reimagines the interplay of class, race, gender, and labor through an experimental, verb-oriented approach to collaboration, integrating new ideas and ideals into perception on a deep, visceral, and existential level by developing and exercising new insight through an embodied process of Co-Creation, chronicling the impact of Erotic Transformation on Economic Self-Determination and Social Mobility in rituals of creative rebellion, steeped in lowbrow protocol.
V4V is Method as Mirror, integrating new ideas and ideals into Perception on a deep, visceral, and existential level by reimagining the interplay of class, race, gender, and labor in an experimental and verb-oriented approach to Collaboration, which develops and exercises embodied insight in a process of Co-Creation, while chronicling the impact of Erotic Transformation on Economic Self-Determination and Social Mobility in rituals of creative rebellion, steeped in lowbrow protocol.
Hi, I’m Kait Vicious.
Aka V. I’m a High-Desert-LA-Hybrid Multimedia Conceptual Artist, Dominatrix, Leather Fetishist, and Director of V for Vicious Project.
I study Body Language — I make paintings with my body, as if they were journal entries, and make that process performance art.
I communicate in the language of Erotic Performance Painting — Erotic in the Audre Lorde sense of the word.
I’m interested in the roles we play, how patterned thinking and repeated action construct values and beliefs, or entire socio-economic-political systems over time, and how the subconscious architecture of Identity informs our systemic ability to recognize, understand, and ethically navigate dynamics of Power Exchange — both within oneself and in relation to others, and how our bodies archive that lived experience.
I love the feeling of being crouched on top of a work in progress, covered in paint, totally immersed in the process of Becoming a Third Thing — both observer and observed, voyeur and exhibitionist, Dominant and Submissive. I am my own muse, I am everything and nothing all at once, simultaneously attuned and detached.
My method is rooted in Taoist and Zen teaching, which emphasizes the principle of mushin, or “no mind” — when the mind is conscious, but conscious of nothing.
For me, painting is a form of meditation, play, and an intrinsically sensual act — it’s forever in the present tense.
I paint to alchemize trapped energy in my body, bringing myself back to the present, and I find that process to be more interesting to look at than the result.
My creative point of view is further informed by a background in Economics and Econometrics — V for Vicious Project builds on that foundation through the lens of Intersectional Feminist Discourse, Contemporary Counterculture, and Punk Philosophy, exploring themes of Communion, Shared Experience, and Taboo in Dialogue, Performance, and Installation.
V for Vicious Project:
Embodied Research.
Erotic Performance.
“Although the erotic relationship may seem to exist freely, on its own terms, among the distorted social relationships of a bourgeois society, it is, in fact, the most self-conscious of all human relationships — a direct confrontation of two beings whose actions in the bed are wholly determined by their acts when they are out of it.”
— Angela Carter, The Sadeian Woman
training ground.
The Erotic Identity functions in practicality as the aggregate of social, economic, political, psychological, biological, and technological forces converging to produce a highly curated image — one that is both symbol and symptom of a deeper cultural pathology, which yields itself in perpetuity to the established hierarchies of class, race, gender, and labor.
Angela Carter’s The Sadeian Woman provides a critical lens through which to examine the foundation of V for Vicious Project:
If who we are in the bedroom is who we are everywhere else, then Kink and Kink as Industry are ideal Socio-Economic-Political Barometers for observing Ascribed Status and addressing the question of Social Mobility.
If Kink and Kink as Industry are Socio-Economic-Political Barometers for observing Ascribed Status and assessing Social Mobility, then V for Vicious Project chooses Dialogue, Erotic Performance, and Installation as Immersive, Collaborative, and Multidisciplinary Training Ground for practicing verb-oriented Self Determination under Contemporary Capitalist Patriarchy:
How are metrics for Ascribed Status, Erotic Identity, and Intimate Partner Dynamics determined in Kink and Kink as Industry?
What do Kink and Kink as Industry reveal about the subconscious architecture of Ascribed Status, Erotic Identity, and Intimate Partner Dynamics?
What is the impact of class, race, gender, and labor on Erotic Identity as Commodity? Ascribed Status as Commodity? Intimate Partner Dynamics as Commodity?
How does V for Vicious Project disrupt the feedback loop between Ascribed Status, Erotic Identity, and Intimate Partner Dynamics in real time?
Kink as Index of Agility.
Self-Determination within a Capitalist socio-economic-political system begins with Social Mobility.
Given Erotic Identity is molded by class, race, gender, and labor, it is inseparable from Ascribed Status, and thus entwined in Sexual Identity.
Under neoliberalism, the fetishization of Identity transforms subjectivity into spectacle — selfhood is labor: to be is to perform efficiently, to be constantly optimizing.
In the age of the Internet, that means even the language of Liberation is commodified — Erotic Empowerment is often branded and sold, rather than embodied as conscious practice. This curated, branded self implies the performativity of existence itself — Identity as Content.
V4V posits that to mistake the performativity of agency for genuine Empowerment is to reproduce the same hierarchies of the existing social order — not a question of whether or not to engage with the Commodification of Internet Culture, but of how to engage.
Kink as Industry thus serves as V4V’s Index of Agility in predicting Social Mobility, which moreover reveals a deeper truth:
The antidote is in the wound.