In the Pheromone Fog: Ella Fleck on Desire, Control, and Fictional Selves

Ella Fleck is a London-based artist and writer whose work explores the psychosexual structures of contemporary life. She uses smells, language, sound, digital platforms, and architecture to explore desires, control, and mechanisms of manipulation. At the 15th Kaunas Biennial, Life After Life, the artist presents the installation Spray, based on seven months of research on the Discord server. Under the guise of her fictional character Jonathan Michaels, the artist joined a community of men experimenting with pheromones and neurolinguistic programming.

In the following conversation, Ella Fleck discusses desire to control, fiction as a research method, and how it felt to become Jonathan Michaels.

You studied English literature. How did it inform your artistic practice?

I studied English literature at the University of Exeter. The course was a combination of creative writing and critical theory, and it taught me everything from how to write poetry and screenplays to reading and analysing critical theory, like gender theory, post-colonialism, spatial theory and digital theories.

I learned two elements that are integral to my practice. First, how to approach language as a material; my texts are a mix of screenplay writing, poetry and hypertexts, taking the form of character monologues. Second, I gained the skills to understand and analyse conceptual frameworks.

You’ll be presenting an installation called Spray at the Kaunas Biennial. Please describe the work.

I’m re-staging Spray, an installation I showed at Season 4 Episode 6 in London last year. This is an architectural installation with audio elements set in an old Stumbras factory, incorporating a pheromone fog. It was the result of a seven-month research project in which I used an alias to interact in a Discord server for men experimenting with pheromones, neuro-linguistic programming, and other subliminal manipulation techniques aimed at coercing women into romantic and sexual relationships.

What was the process of the seven-month research like?

I’d been researching pheromones and asking a lot of questions to a vendor anonymously over email. He invited me to a Discord server which I soon discovered was for sexual coercion. I lurked there for about two months and observed the group’s dynamic. Then, I decided to go into it as this character, Jonathan Michaels, and play out a narrative through posts and conversations on the server. From there, it detonated organically.

And what would be the character background for Jonathan Michaels?

Jonathan is a 40-year-old Caucasian man who works in a museum. He was designed to be on the edge of what that group thought were acceptable and what they thought was unacceptable.

He is charming and intelligent, but he has a deep-seated need for sexual control. His narrative is that he’s been stalking a content creator Giselle online for months and he’s trying to orchestrate the perfect meeting with her through pheromones, through observing and stalking her and Neuro-Linguistic Programming. He’s trying to control the way that their first conversation goes in the hope that he could sleep with her.

How did it feel to pretend to be this man?

I am a woman infiltrating a misogynistic server, so, of course, there’s a degree of critique, exposure, and anger there.

But I’m interested in how the conditions of contemporary life lay the groundwork for such a group to even exist. Why would someone want to control sex and interaction so minutely like that? Desire for love and interaction is a human, but within the group it is manipulative, commodified and cold. It is not about sex in the end, it’s about power. I’m not excusing them. But the question is so much bigger than just this group of individuals. It’s structural, present and dispersed through different aspects of our capitalist lives.

In a way, I wanted to use Jonathan Michaels as a type of embodiment to understand the thought process and impetus behind such a desire. Empathy is the wrong word, but it’s something like that, trying to understand the psychology and conditioning behind it.

Your installation Spray immerses visitors in a dense fog infused with pheromones, such as androstanol and oxytocin, which can be somewhat unsettling. What was the process for calibrating that sensory environment in terms of dosage?

The dosage was determined through trial and error in my studio. The most important thing is the timing of how often it disperses and comes out, how strong the smell is, and how strong the fog is. In the installation in London, it was very thick and overwhelming. I think for Kaunas, it will be more subtle.

I wanted the work to be only the materials that are present in the research, so just the air and the language in the space. That is really all that Jonathan is made up of. And that’s the overarching idea of filling up the room with these subliminal materials.

Tell me more about the AI-generated voice in the background in this installation.

It’s Jonathan’s voice speaking through a combination of his posts, his lyrics and his internal thoughts, forming a long, poetic text. He talks through the narrative of him wanting to meet up with this woman, Gisele, and the conversations he had on the server discussing how to create this interaction. It has other people’s voices in it as well that have been obscured. Those are the actual comments, interactions, and posts from the server.

There’s another work titled My Name is Jonathan Michaels, which also emerged from that same research. Can you tell me more about it?

This installation featured a live feed from the Discord server, although the server’s name was hidden, so viewers couldn’t join or interact. However, they could still see that guys were actively chatting within the server.

And then on the floor was A5 printouts of various things—screenshots, posts that I wrote, ephemera that I found through my research, like a meter called the “hot babe rating scale,” which is used to rate women based on their looks, and notes I wrote in character, all gathered as Jonathan Michaels. All that work is being put into a book that’s coming out soon.

You were also a curator and co-founder of 650mAh (2018-2021), a curatorial project known for staging exhibitions in a MIST Vape Shop in Hove, UK. How did the project come about, and what do these nontraditional spaces make possible that institutional white cubes don’t?

650mAh was a curatorial project between Tabitha Steinberg and me. Neither of us studied curation, but we did a bit of curation and writing together beforehand. We found a vape shop through a friend, and asked if we could use the backroom for exhibitions.

We were interested in presenting work in a different context. Because of the intricacies of our space, artists felt that they could make work experimentally. We didn’t operate through sales or institutions and we didn’t pay rent. So, it was a very DIY project. Each exhibition was different from the last. We wanted each show to focus on the artist and give them a unique space to show something different, which wasn’t something they had to sell or put in an institution.

Are you still developing your curatorial practice in any way?

I’m interested in doing it again at some point, but I’ve put curation on hold while my work develops. Of course, there are overlaps between curating and making work, and they do inform each other. But it’s a different animal. At the moment, it feels like it’s good to keep them separate. There are lots of artist-curators I love, like Goshka Macuga, Frances Stark, and Mike Kelley. But I felt like in my role I was sometimes overstepping that line, or didn’t know what the line was and needed to make my own work.

What kinds of themes, spaces or materials are you interested in exploring next?

I’m still thinking a lot about power, chemical signals, text, gender, and architectural power dynamics. I’ve been thinking about how to portray a scene through just scent and also about birth, rebirth, babies, innocence. Maybe Jonathan will be reborn as something else somewhere soon.

Text by: Justė Litinskaitė