OK Object™ is an intergalactic dating website. Originating as an OK Cupid spoof in 2016, the website ‘matched’ human participants with objects via a questionnaire. Email correspondence with object matches accompanied IRL interactions at Beta Pink’s Space Bar, a pop-up bar/performance at Vancouver Art + Leisure. In 2019, the website relaunched at a workshop called “Realities and Fantasies” hosted by The University of Amsterdam. The website continues to evolve with The Party’s cosmology.

The Party uses fantasy, staging speculative fictions as a way to invite audiences to consider non-human subjectivity. By combining the aesthetics of science fiction with an absurdist send-up of the linguistic and social tropes associated with online dating, the project offers an alternative theoretical space in which to reconsider social relations. This space exists both virtually in the platforms created on the internet via OK Object, and embodied and materialized at Beta Pink’s Space Bar. Objects provide alternative possibilities for imagining relationships unbound by gender, ethnicity, power-relations, and the socio-economic constitutions of human subjectivity. The practice-based research investigates both the material realities of contemporary interpersonal relationships and their conceptual boundaries in an effort to subvert the heteronormative, gender essentialist, patriarchal anthropocentrism still lingering from Enlightenment ideology. The Party takes it as a given that performing speculative fictions is necessary in allowing for the possibility of alternative futures.

A message from Beta Pink
Direction: Layla Marcelle
Camera: Xia Zhong, Layla Marcelle
Lighting: Juli Jackson
Actors: Jazmyn Crosby, Ronnie Jarvis & Chloé Rossetti
The Party
2019

Suzy is a spaghetti monster, beloved object and integral part of The Party’s cosmology.

Suzy is very nice to hold.

The website presented as an installation in 2019. Photo credit Alec Smith