Wallpaper Sex Issue
The Wallpaper July Issue is devoted to sex and features a video and stills they commissioned for “Immersion”. You can see the video above, or go to their site, where the screen is a lot bigger. A friend of mine saw the images in the magazine and pointed out that they’re stylistically very similar to my gamer kids pictures, and had I considered exhibiting them together? Bless. But it was gratifying that the thought occurred to him as soon as he saw the images. The experience of doing the shoot was actually really nice, very relaxed and easygoing. It’s an area that I’ll develop further, for sure.
Anna, an acquaintance who works at Jezebel, put up a story on the Wallpaper video. It’s pretty clear from the comments that people like the subjects of the video, which is great. Normally when you watch a porn video your brain is almost short-circuited by the action- I posted quite recently about how fMRI studies show that the brain starts simulating sex as soon as you see the action. So it’s interesting to record this type of activity without the part of the image that’s going to limit it to titillation. And I think the combination of that, with the further intimacy of them talking about their experience of porn is quite powerful. However, if they came across badly or were unsympathetic, it would be exploitative.
June 15th, 2009 at 6:47 pm
[...] [...]
June 18th, 2009 at 9:49 am
[...] intimacy – produced exclusively for wallpaper.com – video artist and photographer Robbie Cooper shoots back at active porn aficionados lost in ecstatic release and hears how their passion [...]
June 20th, 2009 at 9:31 am
A friend of mine sent me the link to Boing Boing’s post on this project, and I’ve explored it, watched it, love it!
I’m going to feature it on my blog next Sat.
- from a new fan
June 20th, 2009 at 10:09 am
i dont know if u answer the questions .. but im really interested in to know if u were in front of the people where they masturbating… or just film the video, and take some frames, or make the picutres with kind of autoshoot device.. as the ones useds for timelaps.?
i hope u answer, and i hope also my question is understable (since the point im not fluent in english Im afraid that its posible that i didnt express miself correctly)
June 20th, 2009 at 10:55 am
Hi Wanda- there was no one in the room with them at the time. The crew was next door cooking food and chatting. We had a monitor and a remote-control focusing device and one person would be watching the monitor and focusing the camera.
June 20th, 2009 at 10:55 am
Hi “Beautiful Kind”, thanks and glad you like it!
June 22nd, 2009 at 11:58 am
Thanks for the answer,!!! Really interesting to know how it was made, and also the work itself
June 22nd, 2009 at 12:10 pm
“A friend of mine saw the images in the magazine and pointed out that they’re stylistically very similar to my gamer kids pictures, and had I considered exhibiting them together?”
Even better would be a show of your O Faces next to mine which I shot some time ago. Way to go copy.
June 22nd, 2009 at 3:41 pm
Nope, sorry Giulio, I have never seen your pictures before in my life (to be fair, I don’t think many people have). As always, though, just before I shot this, I did some research and found other people who had done similar things, and posted them on my blog;
http://blog.robbiecooper.org/2009/03/29/beautiful-agony/
http://blog.robbiecooper.org/2009/03/25/rapture-frank-yamrus/
http://blog.robbiecooper.org/2009/03/19/blowjob-andy-warhol/
Seems to me that the Frank Yamrus pictures were shot before yours? Certainly, the Andy Warhol material is from the 60’s, so we are both a long way from being the first. Anyway Giulio, I’m sure you’re not missing the point that my images are of people watching porn, and that the point of the Immersion project is to record people as they are, well, Immersed in media. Thanks for your message.
June 23rd, 2009 at 1:49 pm
Really interesting.I know one of the participates and it was fascinating to watch them talk about and perform something so intimate without my knowledge. I felt like a double voyeur, watching them watch porn and orgasm when they don’t know that I’ve seen it.
June 24th, 2009 at 9:35 am
The ethnographer Dr Michael Wesch has written some very interesting stuff on both self-presentation and the perception of viewers (and what he refers to as aesthetic arrest) on YouTube;
http://mediatedcultures.net/ksudigg/?p=183
http://blog.robbiecooper.org/2008/08/15/an-anthropological-introduction-to-youtube/
He doesn’t talk about exactly what you describe (which seems to me is more about the way you’re perceiving it), but his thoughts are maybe the most interesting I’ve read about the way people use video online. This is different, because there’s either the face of an interviewer or the image of what they’re watching in front of the lens, but they still know that it’s there.
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