Hyper Functional, Ultra Healthy opens with an evening of screenings and discussion on the structures, systems, and institutions that shape and influence how sex is consumed, represented, and commodified. Bodies and the Industrial Complex presents the launch and screening of Channel commission Grumpy by Sidsel Meineche Hansen, a new digital artwork dealing with the relationships between automation and arousal, desire and denial.
Following the screening, writer Alex Quicho will be joined in conversation with actor Vex Ashley to discuss the broader structures, systems, and institutions that shape and influence how sex is consumed, represented, and commodified. Bodies and the Industrial Complex will conclude with the screening of A Cyborg Manifesto by Four Chambers, a visual essay and personal exploration of a life spent online.
The film is strictly for over 18s only. Alex Quicho is a theorist and research director in London. She has presented works internationally, including at Transmediale, Creamcake, and Espace Niemeyer. She is a research fellow at the Weibel Institute for Digital Cultures at Die Angewandte and in leadership of SYM, a think-tank for political narrative in the post-platform age.
Her research has focused on the ways that sex, sexuality and gender are experienced and understood today and the way that media and technology are increasingly central to this. Vex Ashley is an independent porn producer and performer and founder of the Four Chambers project. With a background in analog photography, art school bullshit and digital sex online, Vex worked as a cam girl before beginning to make films as Four Chambers in Self-taught in cinematography with an emphasis on collaborative DIY practices, Four Chambers has spearheaded a new wave of creators making contemporary pornographic work from a new perspective with the aim to expand ideas about what porn can say, do and be.
Four Chambers is part of the growing decentralisation from traditional industry practices. Independent, conceptual, creative, porn cinema. She speaks, writes and spends her time talking about making porn creatively and independently, sex as performance, authenticity and the self, art and pornography, technology and sex, camming and online censorship.
