Alex MF Quicho - LOVESCAM

LOVESCAM is a performance in two parts. The first, BUTCHERING, is a two-week Telegram Performance that unfolds in real-time across Telegram's encrypted channels. Participants unknowingly enter a pig-butchering operation where their desires become the raw material for value extraction. Each message exchange pings yet-unintegrated yearnings that exocapital salvages from the numbed-out bodies left after lift. The scam operates as both parasitic mimicry and diagnostic tool: revealing how loneliness radiates from logistical endpoints, how eroticism persists in the churn between overworld and underworld, how the human animal continues to yearn even when corralled into piecework existence. The performer embodies the compound's forced laborer and the lifted subject simultaneously—sending sexy missives from both sides of the barbed wire, fattening marks with the same flattery that feeds the system.

Part 2, LOVE CRIMES is a lecture-performance that exposes the gore layer where flesh and psyche strain under algorithmic desire. Using edits from the film in development IT GIRL—raw footage bleeding into synthetic imagery, total exposure collapsing into radical opacity—the performance tracks how we can become infinitely attractive to extraction while believing ourselves untouchable. The lecture moves through the unnarratable: following links to links to links, scrambling between the macro-economics of $17 billion in annual lovescam revenue and the micro-erotics of a ping, a heartjump, the prick of a PIN. It examines how the "girl intelligence" model of seductive legibility operates across both human and machine learning, creating loops of mutual entrapment that still fail to capture the excesses of love. The performance reveals lovescams not as aberrations but as the pragmatic function of a system that makes criminality the norm—where extra-judicial seduction supports the spin of extractive capital into abstracted experience, crushing loneliness and blood into interfaces that feel light as an oleophobic touch.

Alex Quicho is a theorist and research director in London who collaborates with arts institutions including Tate Britain, Somerset House Studios, Singapore Art Museum, Power Station of Art Shanghai, Julia Stoschek Collection, Nationalgalerie Berlin, Fondation Pernod-Ricard, and Rennie Museum. She teaches narrative theory for MA Narrative Environments at Central Saint Martins, and studied Critical Writing at the Royal College of Art. Alex is from Manila, where she is in leadership of SYM, a think-tank for political narrative in Southeast Asia.