Artvamp: “Other People’s Mirrors”

When is a gangbang video not porn? Why, when it's art, of course. So don't visit this archive of clips from a film project by Chicago-based filmmaker and artist Kristie Alshaibi hoping for some cheap thrills: near as we can make out, the four videos from her "Other People's Mirrors" that have been posted recently on Insane Films deal with themes like submission, identity, capitalism, religion, joyless anonymous sex, and zit picking. (Yes, each one is introduced by producers who worked on the project, but who has time to listen when we're trying to get to the dirty stuff?) Conceived in 1999 as a web-based "community-online-editing-station-web-cam-performance" experiment, the film was released on DVD in 2004 and spawned a series of websites featuring Alsahibi's sex worker and camgirl alter ego "Echo Transgression" before she gave up on the project citing "mental collapse"; given the fact that what we've seen of the final product (which screened at the CineKink festival in New York last week) is rather muddled and not terribly sexy, perhaps it's just as well, even if its original premise of creating a participatory kind of erotic spectacle is one worth exploring further. And if nothing else, there's always that joyless boardroom gangbang video to get creeped out over.

· "Other People's Mirrors" (video excerpts @ insanefilms.com - thanks Matt)

See also:
· "Other People's Mirrors" (film project site and director's statement @ 12taboos.com)
· Echo Transgression (Wikipedia)
· Echo Transgression and Objectify Me (echotransgression.com + objectifyme.com)
· Artvamp (artvamp.com)
· Learn Dirty Movies (Kristie Alshaibi's filmmaking class info @ learndirtymovies.com)

Previously: Usama Alshaibi Photography, Michele Capozzi: "Pornology", Berlin Porn Film Festival, "Psychopathia Sexualis", Cinekink Kickoff Party