Materials & Applications (M&A) presents Trade Safe Chastity Box, an interactive architectural device that serves as an event platform, designed for and installed in the M&A Storefront this Summer and Fall 2025. The Box invites visitors to play with various intimacies while on public display, remixing architectures of surveillance.
Trade Safe Chastity Box mimics these logics of surveillance and alienation. But instead of policing the body, the installation invites the body in—to flicker on a screen, to bump into another pulse. Surveillance devices typically deployed to police our public places—like CCTV cameras, floodlights, peepholes, and safety mirrors—are instead deployed as media for collective hiding and revealing, transforming M&A’s street-facing venue into a performative alleyway that gestures toward the city’s buried histories of cruising, of glances traded in plain view. Within Trade Safe Chastity Box, bodies are neither surveilled nor a spectacle. Visitors perform for cameras that don’t report, only reflect—they flicker and glitch, uncontainable and alive to each other.
The installation serves as a dynamic set piece for a series of public programs that engage topics of queer identity, public space, and contemporary politics, in partnership with regional cultural organizations. In-person events will extend into the street and be shared online.
About
Materials & Applications (M&A) is a Los Angeles-based organization pursuing a public, participatory, and just culture of experimentation in architecture. With a focus on architectural ideas and processes, M&A curates critical exhibitions and commissions new work by under-recognized architects, designers, and artists. Our exhibitions give space to exceptional experiments across multiple disciplines while challenging the relationship between art, architecture, and public encounters. Through an annual calendar of programs, including hands-on workshops, performances, and conversations, we explore how art and architecture can transform underutilized spaces into unexpected encounters. Since 2002, M&A has produced more than 25 temporary site-specific installations and over 100 programs presenting new ideas in art, architecture, and design. Our exhibitions and programs are always free and open to the public.