Shoom! is a piece about fluidity of gender identity and the instability of categories describing sexual desire. I seek to expand the boundaries of established gender categories and sexual orientations and engage in and encourage self-naming to create newly visible identities.
Shoom! is a portrait of one individual. It uses the strategy of the personal is political, in other words, the experience of one can be extrapolated to the experiences of many. There are two types of footage in Shoom! There is interview footage of Ben talking about gender, power, desire, and sexuality and there is spy camera footage taken by Ben as s/he cruises and picks up a man. Ben has an erotic encounter with the man and asks the man probing questions throughout about why he is attracted to people like him. This single channel work is 20 minutes long and cuts back and forth between the two types of footage.
Shoom!
Shoom! Trailer: Interview Running time 5min.
Shoom! Running time 20min. Available for download are two formats of Shoom! for Windows Media Player and Quicktime. If you are a PC user, Windows Media Player should come with your computer. To download Quicktime 5.0 for PC or Macintosh to view the videos, follow the link to get the free version.
If you have a telephone modem conection to the internet you can still download the files above but it will take a long time. As an alternative, you can get a taste of the piece by downloading the interview footage and then browsing the video stills below.
