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Jennifer Mattes & Michael Gülzow

On an old monitor next to an even older VHS player a video is being played. Above this constellation an assortment of posters from the German youth magazine Bravo are displayed. In the video an unidentified person is seen walking down a dark alley, drinking alcohol and shoving a bike. This scene is reminiscent of thrillers in which the protagonist will soon be attacked. The camera moves closer, but nothing happens, as the pain is already there, hidden inside the person wearing the rabbit suit. At certain key moments, found footage is interspersed, exposing the fictional mythologies of romanticized sexuality, by visually overstating definitions and explanations of fictional narratives.

During this whole scene the soundtrack relates a so-called „first time“-story from the German magazine Bravo that was marketed for teens.In her account, being that of an underage girl, she meets and experiences her first sexual encounter with a nearly thirty-year old man. The tone of the story is absolutely positive, everything is positive, even the loss of virginity is described without pain. The sexual experience is heightened to the level of a nearly mythical experience. The retelling of the „first time account“ deliberately moves towards a fictionalization and stylization of the retelling. By marginalizing the negative agency of the male other in the story and by propagating an illusion of truth through the

Discosprite /Jennifer Mattes & Michael Gülzow 2015 

vehicle of the first person account, the sexual encounter is repackaged as only a positive and enriching encounter. Emotional and social interactions undergo a reification constellated within the nexus of the narratological framework of the „first time“-account.The broken synthetic enunciation delineates in its complex collage of different digital voices, the fictitious character of contrafactual sexual expectations.

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