David Wilson goes beyond the binary

When we thought the world couldn’t get any weirder, Riff Raff director David Wilson goes and collaborates with LA-based art project MASSTOR, to launch this entrancing passion project which pushes gender aesthetics to the extreme. 

The film, titled Self Control, sees a bejewelled mythical creature in kink-wear performing minimalist techno music, made in collaboration with Minneapolis-based musician, Mark Mallman. 

The project came about as Wilson had recently spent a lot of time exploring the possibilities of AI software MidJourney, resulting in the Instagram account @RetroFuturistDaddies; a collection of AI-generated moustachioed men, created by cues mainly consisting of photography from 80's gay porno magazines. 

@RetroFuturistDaddies soon attracted the eye of MASSTOR: an art project based out of Los Angeles, California, which explored the type of gay iconography that spoke directly to Wilson's passions. 

MASSTOR's visual language is an expression of the ‘high-binary’; a term describing the fantasy of pushing the gender assigned at birth to dream-like proportions. The primary way this manifested was the fantastical creation of the film's macho, anthropomorphic protagonist. 

This particular expression of MASSTOR sees Wilson come into the fold, collaborating with its makers to create this utterly bizarre music video for a cover of Raf’s 1984 hit, Self Control, co-starring the talents of dancers, Nathaniel Murray, Lola Ray, and Scarlett Kapella.