The erotic film taking you inside the social media panopticon
Four Chambers' latest film Echo Chambers is an experiment in sex, self-image and spectacle.
Echo Chamber is a film and an installation in one: a mirrored box that traps its occupants in an infinite hall of their own reflections. Overstimulating, claustrophobic, seductive - the space forces performers to confront themselves as both voyeur and exhibitionist, observer and observed.
Inside the box, there is no escape from the gaze, both your own, and that of an invisible audience peering through two-way mirrors. Sex here becomes both display and distortion: bodies multiply to infinity, pleasure reverberates off the glass, the self is mirrored, refracted and endlessly scrutinised.
As camgirls evolved into streamers, and selfie rolls filled with near-identical poses, so too did the technology of desire evolve and reshape not only how we fuck but how we watch ourselves fucking. The new film from Four Chambers, starring Vex Ashley, Kali Sudhra, Bishop Black, and Master Aaron, asks: What happens when the tools of self-exposure turn back on us? What is left when the image overtakes the flesh?
Below, we speak to Vex Ashley about the making of the inventive new film.
Can you tell us a bit about this film?
It’s the culmination of a lot of thinking about what it means to be a person online for the last 10 years, a creator and sharer of my own image, a voyeur and an exhibitionist, in the ways that the screen forces of us all but especially when you’re working with sex. I wanted to see what it would be like to fuck in a hall of mirrors, to replicate some of the intense over stimulation of the online space and online sex where you’re confronted with images, reflections, your own and other peoples constantly. The erotics of seeing and being seen.
Intriguing! How was it shot?
We build a mirrored room, a chamber where when you’re inside you can only see yourself but from the outside you can be watched and filmed. This mirrors the way being visible online can sometimes feel, like having an invisible, silent audience constantly watching.
Do you have any fun anecdotes from filming?
We realised pretty quickly that the box reminded us of some iconic 90s pop music video sets, I think there’s a Janet Jackson music video that’s burned into my brain and couldn’t resist getting distracted into performing some classics with dance moves.
What do you hope viewers take away from it?
I hope it raises questions all the looking at images we’re doing, all the gazing at idealised versions of ourselves and others and what that means for our erotic lives, good and bad! I wanted to make sense of the increasingly digital claustrophobia we’re all experiencing and speak to my own experience of sometimes feeling trapped. Porn can be used as a tool to talk about sex and also the things in society that intersect with sex, our increasingly online lives have massively shifted the way we meet, connect and fuck and I want to use films with sex to explore what that means, how that’s shifted our sexual and emotional selves.