2025
LOS ANGELES
Trade Safe Chastity Box
An architectural device where surveillance becomes a medium
SCALE
modular system; components ranging from 2–8 ft; multi-station configurations
TYPE
site-specific installation / performance and event platform
SITES
Materials & Applications (Los Angeles)
SCOPEdesign, fabrication
with Adam Miller
Loudspeaker sheath, rubbish chute, dual-direction peephole diaphragmSecurity camera sheathSecurity camera sheath, video monitor sheath with live video feed, dash-mounted cop spotlight, rubber utility glove
Declassified FBI document detailing surveillance of Los Angeles-based queer organizations, 1966
Trade Safe Chastity Box is an interactive architectural device that debuted within the M&A’s street-facing storefront gallery. The work configured the space into a performative alleyway where bodies were invited to hide, reveal, and glitch in plain sight.
Los Angeles is a city obsessed with watching itself; a landscape of cameras, floodlights, fences, and defensive architecture that fragments the body and polices public behavior. The Box mimics these logics of surveillance, but instead of enforcing control, it opens up a space for play, proximity, and collective mischief.
Excerpt from Bob Dramon’s Address Book, 1968, showing popular cruising spots in Los Angeles
Inside, visitors encounter a choreography of CCTV cameras, convex safety mirrors, peepholes, and light fixtures repurposed from policing infrastructures. These devices don’t monitor; they reflect. They multiply, distort, and refract bodies back to one another, summoning the city’s buried histories of cruising, spectral encounters, and glances exchanged on the street. Rather than spectacle or threat, the body becomes a flicker on a screen: uncontainable, porous, and alive to others.
TEAM
Strat Coffman and Adam Miller
Design and fabrication assistants: Martin Rodriguez, Osama Sukkar,
Jiabao Zhu, Sabrina Ramsay,
Bryan Wilson
*additional help by Chris Humphrey, Philippe Kame, Sydney Sinclair, Sophie Mỹ Hạnh Nguyễntrần, and Rich Coffman