Wet Love's second edition, "Abalone", revolves particularly around issues of the post-modern body and how we relate to the body as post-internet beings. Through imagery and writing, "Abalone" discusses self-mythology, body modification, and the digital erotic.
Wet Love (founded 2019) is an archive and zine that explores how technology changes the future of intimacy, connection, and the creative act. Water becomes a metaphor for the flux and reterritorialization that is possible in the post-internet age. Using posthumanist autotheory, ecopoetics, and wetware aesthetics, Wet Love constructs a vision of hypertechnological utopia.
Wet Love was founded by Ester Freider, a Russian-American curator, writer, and creative director currently studying at Central Saint Martins. Ester initially began Wet Love by collecting and posting images, artworks, and texts about immersion in water. Living in Hong Kong at the time, she was drawn to the ecological connectivity that water signified compared to the regimented and categorized nature of urban daily life. This archival research led her to become interested in ecology and posthuman philosophers such as Deleuze, Haraway, and Preciado. Wet Love thus propagated into a project in which she connects her experiences as an urban and chronically online young person to theory on the future of intimacy and love. Ester's core idea is to remain hopeful and imaginative against the odds, seeing utopic visions as a method of care despite the social and environmental problems at hand.