I Love Your Work is an interactive documentary about the everyday lives of nine individual sex workers. For ten days, I spent 24 consecutive hours with each of nine different women (one woman went twice), while they were filming a lesbian porn series in New York City. Every five minutes, I took ten seconds of video, filming whatever was happening at that moment. The project contains 2,202 of these ten-second clips — around six hours of footage in all.
The clips are intentionally ten seconds long, following the format used by porn sites that offer free teasers enticing viewers to pay to see more. This ten-second format is personally familiar to many, but only from private encounters. The clips provide fractured windows into the realities of those who make fantasies; they are partially teasers for porn, but primarily teasers for life.
The project is limited to just ten viewers per day, and tickets cost $10 each — inverting the usual dynamics of Internet porn (free, on-demand, limitless). There is a calendaring system for booking a date.
Porn plays an important role in the evolution of the Internet. It is the staging ground for almost every new digital technology — porn sites pioneered digital photos, digital videos, online chat, web cams, e-commerce, social networking, and virtual 3D worlds. The most common Internet search queries relate to sex and porn, while porn sites generate more revenue than online advertising, yet receive only a fraction of the attention. Most men (and many women) watch porn, but very few admit it. Porn is the elephant in the room of the Internet.
With a prescient sense of what we really want, porn taps into what is just below the surface — what is not yet accepted by mainstream society, yet what is in us anyway — percolating, potent, and primal. In this way, porn is a predictor of culture. The willingness of porn stars to open their lives to an anonymous public foreshadows broader cultural shifts around privacy, authenticity, sexuality, and self-promotion, where the lines between life and work are increasingly blurry.
