DIRECTOR'S STATEMENT

In 1999 I began a new web community-online-editing-station-web-cam-performance titled Other People's Mirrors. The original plan was to create a fictional character - a schizophrenic sex addict named Echo Transgression - who would write about her experiences, and perform them as a feature length motion picture. A web community formed around her as each new hand-scrawled journal entry was posted. More than 5000 people joined, drawn in by her free naked cam performances and erotic adventures. The web site was also surrounded by the meta-narrative of creation, as well as a video-making collaboration with the audience. All cast and crew kept web logs detailing the movie-making experience. In addition, thanks to generous private funding, a condo was rented for the key players and OPM HQ was set up. Web cams would watch the everyday lives of all participants. As the movie was being shot a database of QuickTime clips - raw footage from the movie - were posted. All of the community's 5000 members were invited to download the clips and begin cutting their own videos using the footage. Those with slow connection speeds could purchase CD-Rs of the clips for a nominal shipping fee. I would then upload the results on a page called "The Mixes."

An actor was selected to play Echo. Parallel to the production of her fictional scenes I would attempt to emulate the character's experiences, pre-scripted by me, in real life scenarios. For example, the movie opens with Echo propositioning a stranger on a train. He follows her home and has a quick, cold sexual encounter. It was my intention to board a train and actually proposition fellow riders. A documentary videographer would follow along and capture the responses, and the possible resulting sexual act. The finished movie would incorporate my documented experiences of emulating the erotic script, inter-cut with the fictional enactment of the script by the actor.

Several problems arose out of this complicated proposal. First the actor chosen to play Echo became nervous about the project, and backed out before production began. This left me playing the part of Echo Transgression, in effect combining both parallel scenarios into one. The scenes themselves became documentary-style events with pre-designated players. In addition, only two of all 5000 community members took an interest in re-editing the QuickTime movies. This sort of open source editing idea was a flop, I assume due to the bandwidth limitations, in addition to drawing a primarily voyeuristic, rather than participatory, audience.

The positive outcome was that a community did form. Members posted images of themselves along with detailed information about their favorite artists, their personal statistics and the like. They posted in forums. There were often 500 or more people at one time tuning into to the members-only web cams, which refreshed at 30-second intervals. The motion picture was completed several years later, and is about to enjoy its world premiere at the Gene Siskel Film Center in September. Echo's fan base translated into a small group of devoted subscribers to her paid porn site. As a sex-worker persona, Echo drew the attention of such media as MTV, and shock jock radio programs like Mancow's Morning Madhouse.

In retrospect, I believe the multiple layers of narratives confused the direction of this ambitious project. Those attracted to erotica were not necessarily interested in editing videos, and editors were often turned off by the graphic sexual nature of the web site. The inability to place another actor in the role of Echo confused the identity of (myself) the maker with the identity of the fictional persona. Behind-the-scenes documentation became tangled with pornographic performance, degenerating the whole of the project into simple (if somewhat unusual) jerk-off material. It transformed into a now much too familiar form of independent porn that was already in existence. In short, it satisfied the passive voyeur, but not the maker.

Had I known how to effectively manage all of these trajectories at once, I think I would have broken some theoretical ground. But the loss of my own persona to that of my alter ego caused a decent into confusion, and led to a mental collapse. In short, I became too emotionally and psychologically invested in Echo's Transgressions, to the detriment of the project.

However, after several years, and some much needed distance, I am finally able to draw themes from the original narrative of the movie, and explore them in more depth. In the finished movie, Echo believes that messages are being transmitted into her nervous system, and that if she follows their directives (all of them taboos regarding the body) she will escape to her own version of nirvana. As critic Michael Workman of New City describes it, "Echo evolves into a nihilist masochist famished by her own pitiless self-denigration for an ultimate, transcendental self-affirmation that never occurs, a post-modern Catherine Deneuve in 'Belle de Jour.'"

In the movie, Echo is followed by a phantom character - a Narcissus brought back from the dead - who she supposes is an agent of the organization in charge of transmitting these directives. At the end she disappears into his embrace, and leaves behind only a series of voicemail messages (just as her mythological namesake left behind the sound of her voice). I have been shooting and writing a series of movies and performances, in collaboration with my husband, Usama Alshaibi, that pick up where this idea left off. These attempt to materialize the notion of a schizophrenic paranoid reality, and the effect of surveillance on that reality. Paul Virillio's concept of the virtual as a second reality, as opposed to simulation has had some influence on my latest angle of thinking. I am abandoning, for the moment, the ambition of drawing a large community into a fully participatory experience and completely democratizing moviemaking. I am backtracking to uncover the ideas that first inspired me in 1997, when Echo was born into my imagination.

I have not, however, given up on the web as artistic medium. The O.E.S. (Organization for Erotic Studies), the entity that was in fact transmitting the titillating commands to Echo in Other People's Mirrors, is setting up their own web site at http://eroticstudies.org. I have become their chief officer. Returning to the narrative of my 1998 movie, "Displaced Artifacts of a Clockwork Self," I will pursue my poor troubled alter ego across the planet, alternately entering her fractured mind, and tracking down material clues as to her whereabouts whenever she evades me.