Blending artist video, porn clips and experimental music, Dirty Looks’ Bradford Nordeen leads a visual lecture exploring the recent re-emergence of the bathhouse in queer culture. From the reissued sex soundtracks of Patrick Cowley and Coil, musicians like Ruth Mascelli and Jake Muir bring techno and vaporwave into the steamroom to ply new forms of embodiment. Videos by Oat Montien spin archival art by Patrick Angus, Alvin Baltrop James Bidgood and Jimmy Wright into their own digital utopias. These emerging artists gape the capacity for the bathhouse to create alternative strategies for pleasure that resound Cowley’s sacred pools while squatting them, revising that pearled white tile with a queer politics of the future.

Dirty Looks, Inc. is a platform for queer film, video and performance founded in 2011 by Bradford Nordeen. Using film and time-based art to illuminate queer histories and liminal spaces across Los Angeles and New York City, Dirty Looks traces contemporary queer aesthetics through historical works, presenting quintessential GLBTQ film and video, alongside up-and-coming artists and filmmakers.