Fuses was the name of a film by the artist Carolee Schneemann completed in 1967, filmed with her lover James Tenney, Fuses explores sex, explicit sex - a tangle of two bodies merging, coupling and uncoupling - one and two simultaneously. The celluloid of the film itself is scratched, burned and painted - painstakingly augmented with poetic marks - a love letter to physical intimacy in all its forms.
I used the name as a reference to talk about the ways in which sex 'fuses', merges bodies, entering, penetrating, consuming, holding, manipulating physical forms to remove any space left between us, pushing through spacial boundaries to experience an intense and vulnerable closeness and combination.
But the word 'fuse' also references electricity, electrical currents and overload. Whereas in 1967 Carolee Schneemann shot her Fuses on analog 16mm celluloid we make films, fuck and communicate using digital, electronic devices, currents flowing across continents onto screens - now more than ever in the wake of the pandemic.
We wanted to make a film in lockdown isolation that honoured the potential future collaborations missed and explored new ways to fuse and fuck across distances. All the performers featured in this film are people we'd wanted to work with on Four Chambers future projects in 2020. Vanniall, Koras, Kaliand Io’s bodies projected over and merging with mine, the light from them captured through lenses into binary, transmitted across distances into shimmering pixels on screens thrown in beams of light onto and into another body.
Carl Sagan famously said we are made of star stuff but our images are now more often constructed of shimmering points of light on a screen.
The shiny stuff is a spray that looks invisible to the naked eye, it goes on completely clear and only when you shine a beam of light at it at exactly the right angle does it illuminate like you see here, and when you see it you can see exactly where it ended up - all over your floor, walls and in luminous foot prints all over your house like a black light. I’m looking forward to making a proper two or more person film with it when we hopefully come out of lockdown.
The music is by the incredible Penelope Trappes, I've loved her album PENELOPE TWO since its release and I'm really excited to get to use it here, go listen to the whole thing and the remix album and fall in love.
