“Lollipop,” which I co-wrote with Los Angeles-based artist Maxwell Musick, addresses our mutual frustration over the many men who take advantage of our sexual openness and vulnerability. In our music video, we grow Fuck Boys in a latex laboratory, testing and gauging their sexual, athletic, and emotional prowess with the intentions of designing and producing the perfect partner for a relationship. But the cathartic experiment goes wrong, and the Fuck Boys turn out vapid and emotionless, leaving Maxwell and I with no choice but to kill them off one by one. At the end of the day, we are responsible for our own creations — we had no need to grow them in the first place. To kill them off is to eliminate our high standards for love and to realize that we have the power to demand better for ourselves.

I fucking loooove the term cyberpunk. The way it alludes to something lawless, to something experimental. How it proposes altering and morphing the standard way of doing things. How the cyberpunk community has collectively decided to do shit their own way and raise a big FUCK YOU to industry standard. 

Watching cyberpunks find new ways to jump through hurdles during quarantine has been mad exciting. The experimentation I’m witnessing has proven how deep our creativity flows if we just open the valve. More artists are turning to technology as a tool to connect with others and challenge the status quo, stepping beyond the role of entertainer and becoming creators. When artists are stripped of the crowd, the lighting team, the pyro, the visuals, the foundation — adaptability compels us to think and work like scientists. It felt special to embody the head scientist of a laboratory in the “Lollipop” music video because it made me question my role as an artist. Making art is a form of cathartic problem solving, a way of testing and combining different ingredients into conceptual metaphors. Mixing things that don’t usually go together is where I have the most fun as a creator. I can be more than just a musician or visual artist or video producer. I can freely create without classifying myself, interchanging various roles and allowing them to build off each other.

Personally, I’ve spent quarantine combining my music with different artificial intelligence and A/V setups. How can we treat concert visuals as a separate instrument? How can we turn to technology as enhanced performance tools? How can we use tech to solve problems like budget cuts? How can we make an audience member feel singular and comfortable enough to express themselves fully, while also evoking comradery amongst a sea of people?

My space for experimentation and exploration is Vondom Labs, a 360 production house, record label, and online tech marketplace I founded a few years ago. As a tech nerd at heart, I was looking for an organic merge of art and tech that gave me control over crafting and enhancing the human experience. As a woman, the idea of claiming tech or science felt incredibly daunting, but I decided to just fucking go for it. All I had to do was make the effort to learn and expand my knowledge. Once that hurdle was crossed, it came natural to remain curious and consider different perspectives.

My music career began by making weird sounds and nerding out. I realized that sextech would allow me to mess around with sound design and produce sounds with my own body. I stumbled upon Lioness, a Bluetooth vibrator that uses internal sensors to record your contractions to an app on your phone. With the audio plugin and wavetable synthesizer Serum, I can play around with the waveforms of my contractions to create rhythms and beats to build music on top of. It’s like masturbating twice.

People describe my music as “angry sexy,” “scary synth,” “curated migraine,” — a real myriad of responses. I’m drawn to mixing the crunchy, gritty sounds of bass drums and sawtooth synths with an unconventional glittery topline. My brain is like Trail Mix — a hodgepodge of Berlin nightclubs, early 2000s electro/synth pop, soundbites on the subway, Beth Orton, suburban moms, LED lights. 

The sex-positive nature of Vondom Labs exposed me to algorithmic biases and the lack of visibility in social networking. Enough people find discomfort in my messaging that social media tools work against me. It’s nearly impossible to run any type of ads on Instagram because of my content. I’m always “violating community guidelines” that conveniently never seem to be stated anywhere. So I figure I should at least embrace this hindrance on my artistic expression. Why not prioritize the cyberpunk community and the people who care about me while simultaneously expanding conversations on sex positivity, sex education, and bodily autonomy? 

In September, I needed to find a creative way to promote “Lollipop” and its messaging that, sometimes, men can be suckers. So some friends and I adorned blow-up sex dolls with the faces of right-wing pundits and corporate capitalist hotshots and zip-tied them to sign posts around Brooklyn. We attached a QR code that directed the public back to the Vondom Labs website, meaning anyone who accessed the site spent the rest of their day thinking about issues pertaining to sex. I hope Zuckerberg’s pissed that I called him a sucker.

I’m lucky to be part of a scene of underground femme creatives that support and look out for each other. The collaboration process always feels seamless because we aren’t racing to outdo each other to the top. We know that working together in comradery is more beneficial than A&R dudes pinning us against each other. The stuffiness and exclusivity of the art world means nothing if it’s at the expense of artists. Only when institutions present genuine, transparent desire to serve our communities will their tools, metrics, and ranking systems hold any meaning to us. Until they really want to use their resources to support our messages, I’ll keep turning them into sex dolls.