Size Matters? Shorts, Porn, and Malleable Desires

Four Chambers’ Vex Ashley on Making and Curating Porn

An opening film festival night event like no other, the London Short Film Festival treated its audiences to a layered, textured cinematic experience; a tangible screen (16mm projections onto gauze) and pairs of short films screened in parallel decorated the Institute of Contemporary Art (ICA) London for a night of vivid, tactile pleasures. Multi-screen, multi-format, inclusive, and horizontal: an event like this reformulates the notion of visual stimuli through a web of desires with the joint effort of Zodiac Film Club (“good looking films, complex female characters, and our faves in cult, classic and contemporary cinema”) and Four Chambers, a project deliberately situating itself on the punctum where art and porn meet, all under the aegis of London’s renowned festival. In other words, a three-way you would hate to miss out on.

Vex Ashley, performer and head of Four Chambers, is a self-taught filmmaker with a background in art practice. The project has been growing for over ten years, and a collaboration between the London Short Film Festival and Zodiac Film Club has been in the works for a while. Between ‘traditional’ film curation, a festival celebrating experimental approaches, an art venue, and porn filmmaking, this opening event falls in line with the ethos of Four Chambers, which I could describe using the word ‘horizontality’: you have Kenneth Anger on 35mm and eroticism, themes of interiority, bodies, and sex.

The urge to talk to Vex was born a couple of years ago when I first encountered Four Chambers over Instagram, where their social media presence abides by the ever-constraining rules of “social-media-acceptable” nudity. Yet, the stills and reels available have the power to transport you to another realm. There are soft, sensual images whose warmth seems to emanate from within; close-ups of lips interlocked, a split-screen of a hand caressing a face and another hand caressing a large sea shell, a bee pollinating a flower, a woman masturbating another. Even when the colour-coding is cold (like neon blue or pink), the shadows embracing bodies in contact feel tender and loving. Double exposure, negatives, rack focus, and mirroring often refract what you see, forming a kaleidoscope of desire. We’re not here to convince you that there is porn that is artistic or looks great—that is indisputable truth. What Four Chambers do is short filmmaking, and what Vex Ashley does as an artist is using porn as her medium.

At a sold-out anniversary screening late last year, I first saw pornographic films at a cinema when the ICA showcased a ‘best-of’ selection with a runtime of over ninety minutes. Even if it is more or less the length of a ‘regular’ shorts programme at a festival, such a block spoke to the malleable nature of sexuality through its programming: the build-up, the rhythm, and the simple fact of being exposed to 90 minutes of sensual, evocative pornography made me reconsider the divide separating it from other visual content.

Unfortunately, there still aren’t many places to see pornographic work sitting next to more ‘traditional’ art, but the LSFF opening event provides a suitable context for “porn to inform and be in relationship with other forms of media, as it often tackles similar topics,” as Vex remarks. “In this case, you don’t have to think about things necessarily in the category of, ‘this is porn and sex, and then this is other stuff’. It all merges together and speaks to each other.” The context we’re used to viewing porn in is insular, for reasons of privacy: at home, furtively, when we get a minute. But seeing Four Chambers shorts in a public environment, and in conversation with experimental films, can recontextualise one’s own relationship to pornography as a vessel for clandestine pleasures.

Vex Ashley © Four Chambers

On the topic of whether we can speak of a context that’s original to porn, Vex hesitates to state a clear-cut distinction. “What we consider to be porn has changed so much throughout history. Before the moving images we consume today, obviously, porn existed as still images and pornographic drawings. Then cinema became the context to view porn, just because that was the only place to see visual moving media. But before that, you would have a much more private experience.” According to Vex, it’s not that much about the context dictating the viewing habits, but more like “how our relationship to how we view it has changed as the medium itself has changed; how the public and the private ebb and flow in the same way as how we engage with the media ebbs and flows.”

Seeing sex on screen together with an audience can turn from awkward to dazzling to liberating since, as Vex suggests, “maybe something can get a little bit lost in just keeping it as an intensely one-on-one private experience, where you don’t discuss and you don’t see in contact with other people.” Instead of considering it an interior, solitary experience by default, a lot of creators, collectives, and curators have worked hard to establish a network of porn film festivals around the globe. As a person who has yet to visit one such festival, I ask Vex how it differs, to which she replies, laughingly, “You know, I haven’t been to many non-porn short film festivals.” But in the way she views it, the porn ones “are at their best, when they aren’t necessarily preoccupied with curating the slickest, most professional, most aesthetically accomplished works, but instead, they provide a space for more weird and experimental stuff.” Being together and looking at media with sex that is not incredibly polished or politically clear, or big-budget, is “like a haven for freaks,” she adds, admiringly. “For me, porn is best when in some capacity, it’s just somebody exploring their sexual desires or their creativity around sex in a way that doesn’t feel bounded by a need to make it look faultless.”

This kind of openness and communal sense of exploration, which is also safe and respectful, is undoubtedly something non-porn film festivals can learn from their porn relatives. The short film circuit is known for being already more welcoming and versatile than most established feature film ones, but the care that goes into exhibiting porn to festival audiences acknowledges the pliability of desire that’s part and parcel of both the making and the viewing of pornography. Projecting sex on screen as porn enlivens or animates a cinema space in a way that’s incomparable to any genre or type of film. However, there are also tendencies to be observed in both the porn and non-porn film industry, and they have to do with an age-old dichotomy: arthouse and mainstream.

While a lot of porn curation often opts for more queer or experimental porn (and for a good reason, she adds), Vex finds it intriguing to discover work made within the mainstream canon presented alongside its so-called outliers, such as hentai porn shorts. “That malleability of desire, being open to encountering strangeness or something that can challenge and arrest us, is perhaps the most exciting thing about working in the porn space. There’s a freedom in feeling like you don’t necessarily have these specific rules and institutions that you have to pay lip service to, and that you can make your own work on your own terms. I think it’s important to protect that sort of freedom.”

When asked whether she’d describe the work of Four Chambers as arthouse porn, Vex seems in two minds. “When I was starting, I had these lofty ideas. I aligned myself a lot more with that label. I guess it was wishful thinking in a way.” But since arthouse cinema as a concept came into existence in response to Hollywood’s hegemony and huge budgets, there isn’t a direct counterpart to be found in the history of porn production. “Everything is independent. There are very few huge porn conglomerates producing big-scale studio work, but they’re just nowhere near Hollywood.” The value comparison, however, still stands. A label such as “artistic” can elevate one kind of content while casting a shadow on another, and the delineation between them is often arbitrary. Vex reminds us that if we say “artistic porn,” we’re implying that it’s “good porn, that it’s better, more acceptable, and more respectable.” The opposition becomes charged, on the expense of “that horrible other porn,” a completely artificial dichotomy. Tracing her own push and pull with such legitimising labels, Vex shares that she’s now moved away from their strictness. She adds: “I realised I believe that all porn has cultural merit, even if it doesn’t necessarily look a certain way or, you know, doesn’t necessarily have these conceptual underpinning bearers.”

Not that the work of Four Chambers needs any validation, but it seems as Vex’s own relationship to her work is in constant flux. “I am now coming full circle, asking myself questions such as “What’s this doing? What’s the purpose of making it? What’s the intention, the thought process behind it?” to incorporate ethical self-reflection into porn filmmaking. She describes Four Chambers’ approach to porn filmmaking as “art-adjacent,” adding that it’s important to celebrate pornography across genres, but also to critique it, investigate, and explore it, because it is deserving of that kind of investigation.” “Art” or “arthouse” describes not only a certain hierarchy of tastes, and a presentation, but also implies a particular aesthetic that then carries these values and invites value judgements. In the work of Four Chambers, and other porn makers like them, it’s eye-opening to witness a space where these kinds of hierarchies are continuously questioned and destabilised.

© Four Chambers

There’s another film-related hierarchy that Four Chambers has been challenging for a decade now, and it concerns length. Does size matter when it comes to the duration of porn films? According to Vex, the short form is not only suitable but preferred, calling herself a “proponent of the short as a narrative piece of media.” With an all-short portfolio, Four Chambers owes its dedication to the format of music videos. “A short shouldn’t be considered a stepping stone, in the same way that a short story is successful on its own. For me, some of the most impressive pieces of creative media that I not only grew up with but also fell in love with were music videos. They really inspired me to make films.” Without a lot of set-up and world-building, they create an atmosphere in a snap and rely on a convincing aesthetic to do so. In not having the time to spoon-feed an audience a lot of narrative, Vex sees the potential of such short forms: “You basically get dropped into a scenario, an emotion, a feeling, and you have a very short amount of time to make sense of what you’re seeing and hearing. I think there’s something really powerful about that, for a creator.”

The project’s name comes from writer Anaïs Nin’s 1950 autobiographical novel The Four-Chambered Heart and provides a metaphor for how Vex envisions her artistic practice as a filmmaker and performer. “I conceive of the films as rooms where you just open a door, and you find yourself in this other world, forever. You may not necessarily get all of the answers you seek there, but you get the emotions. You can spend some time, and then you have to close the door and move on to another room.” Those world-rooms provide much more than an escape: they offer inspiration (the associative montage of bodies, fluids, nature, objects), representation (bodies and sexualities of all kinds), and the sublime pleasures of arousal that are much more complex than mere titillation. “I think that short visual media can be so much more powerful, punchy, and gripping because it doesn’t explain everything,” Vex adds.

Even with these occasional screenings, Four Chambers exists online. Considering the ways the digital ecosystem has influenced the way she makes porn, Vex says she couldn’t imagine it existing if it wasn’t for the digital spaces that “both created and informed” her. In addition to camming and posting GIFs on Tumblr, there have been many corners of the Internet that have shaped her relationship to both porn and sex; some of them, sadly, no longer exist. “It’s a double-edged sword,” she confesses, because the climate has changed so much over the years. “There was a point when the Internet was this incredible arena of possibilities for community-building; you could be exposed to media, people, and places you would never have had the opportunity to do before. But now, it feels very much like it’s becoming more and more insular and restricted.”

There might be salvation in physical media. “You know, the older I get, and the more time I’ve spent online, the more I feel like moving away from exclusively online communities and spaces to actually doing events in person. With such screenings, we’re also figuring out ways in which the work can exist more in the physical space.” In accordance with her own art background, she admits that building and sharing an atmosphere in a physical space has become increasingly important to her. “I would love to do more events, and in particular, to make a Four Chambers art exhibition, expanding on what we did at the ICA.” Sharing the disposition of film-philosopher Vivian Sobchack, whose book The Address of the Eye lent its title to the LSFF-Four Chambers-Zodiac Film Club event, Vex speaks of porn (and cinema) as an embodied subject, made so only by our presence there as humans; gifting us places where film can be both sensual and sensing, in its own right.