Week 04: I Love Your Work

‘I Love Your Work’ is an interactive documentary by filmmaker Jonathan Harris. The film explores the lesbian porn industry in New York City.

What interests me about this project is the constraints set around it – the filmmaker spent 10 days with nine separate women, and filmed 10 seconds of footage of them every five minutes. What results is a series of raw and intimate clips – 2,202 of them, in fact – which force us to think about intimacy and the realities behind fantasies.

I didn’t actually view the entire documentary, but I watched the five-minute trailer and the preview section of the website which shows you what to expect. The viewing process is also another interesting constraint of the film – you must purchase $10 tickets which grant you access to the documentary for 24 hours. However, only 10 viewers are allowed per day. I think this is a really deliberate move by the filmmaker to challenge our concept of instant gratification which is so prevalent in our modern lives (not to mention in the world of porn, too).

There is about six hours of footage in total. The interface through which you chose from the 2000+ fragments is very interesting, as you get to choose between three modes:

1) Tapestry interface, where you can scroll through the days/times and it tells you which person’s video you will watch.

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2) Timeline interface, which shows the beginning time and end time of each person’s day.

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3) Talent interface, which gives you a grid of all nine women from whom you can pick.

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I wonder if a project with these kinds of constraints, content and design would ever be able to be produced using software like Korsakow.