A Room Within A Room Without A Room

August to November, 2025
Sunset Boulevard, Los Angeles

We held the scavenged mattress above the synthetic turf. The strip of sidewalk immediately in front of the gallery on Sunset Boulevard doubles as a neighborhood dog toilet, and we were trying to keep the mattress clean long enough to get it through the door. This is how Trade Safe Chastity Box began: in negotiation with the street. For a month we used the sidewalk as our fabrication shop, peeing into Gatorade cups in the absence of a more legit bathroom, while traffic churned past in the August heat. We maneuvered powder-coated panels, steel strut, security hardware, and two street mattresses through a storefront doorway to assemble a 67-square-foot room inside a 170-square-foot gallery. Uber drivers stopped to gawk and film; people left bumper-to-bumper traffic to join events or honked and hooted through their windows.

One night, a drunk Dodgers fan on his way home from the game stopped, looked through the glass, and said it looked like something from the Saw movies. He wasn’t totally wrong about the genre. The Box assembled familiar apparatuses of urban security (CCTV cameras, convex mirrors, floodlights, peepholes, intercoms) into an intimate interior continuously broadcast online and exposed to the street. On some level, the Saw comparison cuts to the core: the horror of the security device is not that it locks us out. It’s that it gets so close, often without detection.

The Box sweated. Its built-in air conditioner chugged with intake and exhaust opening into the same tiny room, dripping condensation onto the mattress alongside our own. The street mattresses, strung in shibari tension, formed a lounge for this public bedroom. Locks and keys beckoned visitors to disrobe the protective sheaths of each security device at will. Escaped children crawled through the silicone dog door and turned the plastic-wrapped mattress into a pillow fort. A rubbish chute integrated into the Box’s skin doubled as a pillow for reclining; by night’s end, the vinyl bag beneath someone’s head was filled with the street’s trash. Food and drinks smeared across washable surfaces of plastic, powder-coated steel, aluminum, glass, concrete.

Inside: convex mirrors that warped your face into someone else’s, peepholes at different heights along the panels, locks hanging their keys on glittering chains, a black rubber glove pushing through a hole in the wall, cameras running but only giving you back yourself, delayed, flickering, unresolved. During a screening event, bodies packed themselves across mattresses and floor, rubbing together to fit. We used the Box as a projection booth, its embedded projector throwing film onto the gallery wall so that visitors on the sidewalk could watch through the glass, street reflections layering onto the projected image, the sidewalk becoming a mirrored annex of the interior. We piped the audio outside. The boundary between room and street, already porous, dissolved further into image and sound, while the sidewalk thickened against the glass.

The Box was on Twitch the whole time. During a shibari event, plate glass doubled bodies with reflections, separating touch by less than an inch. Standing outside, we could hold the phone against the performance it claimed to show us. One body pressed against plate glass another glowed behind the phone’s black mirror, always arriving too late to touch the first. The delayed feed produced another, never-quite-coincident version of the same encounter: the room as it was thirty seconds ago, flickering on someone’s screen somewhere, uncontainable and still leaking.

At each night’s end, despite what had escaped the room, something remained. Condensation in the machine, fingerprints on the glass, food on the floor, garbage beneath someone’s head, an image of a body still traveling through wires. When we deinstalled the A/C Unit, we poured out nearly a liter of water. The Box had held it this whole time.