surface encounters

Alessandra and I are members of a collective of emerging visual artists, working with experimental film. We wanted to introduce some of the work we are doing, as well as give context to some pictures posted below. Our collaborations bring technology, art, philosophy and pornography into conversation with one another in a way that cuts a path through the existing segregation, to actively engage with “queer subjectivities” from a non-identity-based, non-gendered perspective. For us this means creating images that exceed or displace the signifying framework of representation in order to open up a space where desire and pleasure become the driving forces of sense-making – for both the producers and the audience. Ultimately, we are interested in an aesthetic practice that does not posit a new discourse of sexuality but rather continuously resists closure by exploring expression, processual sexuality and eroticism.

Our first project (see first two photos) was in response to a call from the Berlin PrOn Film Festival, where participants were given five rules and four days to complete and upload their projects. Our approximate concept for the piece engaged with the notion that cyberspace offers utopian possibilities for alternative (non-hegemonic) spaces to co-exist with Real Life. Cyber69½ (a tribute to Bruce la Bruce’s Super8½) ironically demonstrates the failure of this project, as bodies slip back into normative sexual encounters. Our collaborative work was as much spontaneous as experimental, as set creation, costume design (assembled from second-hand or found materials) and filming was process-based rather than determined from the outset.

Our second project “Pornopticon - Erotic Peepshow, 25¢” was installed at the Erotic Meltdown Festival in Toronto. The piece incorporates three 3D short films (3-5 minutes each) in the style of a peep show, where spectators enter a booth to look through 3D glasses. The booth, designed in the style of the real peep show–including paper towels and other sex-show paraphernalia–– frames the images, breaking their chain of signification and challenging dominant assumptions of what pornography is supposed to be. Our playful engagement with 3D technology gives texture to the relationship between surfaces and the sensorium, distilling, fragmenting and augmenting the erotic image. Here, objects and body parts come to emphasise an eroticisation of the detail (versus coded sexual beings), exploring the aesthetic potential of surfaces––organic and inorganic–– as external and shifting triggers of productive desire.

Our approach to creativity and to sexuality follows the proposition that desire is never simply a single line, but originates from bodies that are already multiple, and thus sexuality can never be fully represented, but at best partly exposed. The exploration of such informs our art practice as a singular affirmation of already existing, albeit unarticulated visions of desires and pleasures that cannot be reduced to gendered identities, sexual orientations, codes, or perversions – to cut-up bodies and organs that are arranged to form a social order. All this is based on the belief that a creative and ethical re-articulation of the roles and meanings of sexual encounters that defies representation and morality can only be based on the actual experience of sharing and coming into contact with others, to keep exploring and experimenting. [See J. Ricco The Logic of the Lure]